


The Secret Of Rubicun III

by mindthebutterfly



Series: Burning Stars [1]
Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: F/M, Gen, Graphic Description of Corpses, Other, Pon Farr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-27
Updated: 2020-01-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:13:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 52,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21985696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mindthebutterfly/pseuds/mindthebutterfly
Summary: "Ultraviolet light can only be seen under the right circumstances..."A prisoner escapes...A virus on Rubicun III...A man goes missing...A fallen God...A series of events that ignites a conflict between The Federation and its own citizens. How far will two men go to avoid, or meet, their destinies?EDIT: I changed the name of this story in the series, and Burning Stars is still the name of the series. There is going to be multiple sections to this, so I think I'd like to separate them all neatly. Sorry!
Relationships: Beverly Crusher/Jean-Luc Picard, Data (Star Trek) & Original Female Character(s), William Riker/Deanna Troi
Series: Burning Stars [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1582660
Comments: 4
Kudos: 22





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Line breaks have now been fixed for this series. I said I wouldn't do it, immediately felt guilty, than did it. I will NOT fix all punctuation and grammar errors! No, seriously, you'll have to wait until I find a beta for THAT to happen!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ~I don’t know why I’m writing this. I haven’t written anything in ages, let alone fanfiction. But this damn idea took over my Christmas holiday so I must. This is going to be very LOOOOOOONG. I might not ever finish it. And it makes heavy use of Original Characters. Because I can’t write my own universes, I have to create characters to put into OTHER universes. That happens. A lot of death happens too. Don’t kill me if I don't get Star Trek’s timelines right, I’m trying to write during the Dominion War, the whole thing is AU anyway. So we can say this takes place after First Contact, just after Bashir is discovered to be Genetically Engineered. And then the AU hyjinks ensue. Enjoy

Caged birds never sing. His captors should have known that from the very start. But he sang. He talked, chatted, and bantered, and had done so from the moment he had arrived.

Darkness crept into the barracks at the Talarian asteroid prison 8723 as it turned in its rotation towards the star that held its orbit. This facility was given no name, only the number of the one, and only, prisoner this place was designed to hold. The patrols of soldiers moving between empty cell blocks on routine inspections never looked into the cell of the prison’s lone occupant for very long. He remembered you, and this was never wise. 

Being remembered was something that, for a race proud of its warrior traditions and strict military traditions, could result in higher rank from superiors, accolades from civilians, and advancement through the government.

Not here. Not here where the lone prisoner remembering your face could very well result in your death, or his escape, or both. He remembered you, your routine, your position, your likes, your dislikes, and your faults. And he talked, and he could whistle down the stars to stand before him if given two seconds of time to speak. The wise did not give him that, only the foolish would stop to chit chat, or enjoy his unhappy complaints about the starchy prison food. The foolish, like Officer Foran. After many weeks, they still had not discovered what had become of the man’s head, only that the prisoner had gotten as far as the inner wall moat leading out of the atmosphere containment before he collapsed, exhausted.

Any other prisoner would have been shot on sight and done with. But this was not a Talarian prisoner. And the treaty with the Federation stated very clearly how human prisoners should be treated. Execution of a human prisoner could result in the end of that treaty.

Still, a prison dedicated entirely to one man seemed ludicrous to anyone else. But serving on this asteroid was considered an honor beyond all others. This man had earned the highest praise of the Talarian officers that had brought him here. He had earned the honor of the ‘Teek Hada’, Prisoner Most Respected.

That he was so strong, cunning, and clever that he needed his own prison was moot. This man had traded his life for the lives of his entire crew, some ten years ago, and brought together Talaria and the Federation in a very strong way as allies.

But this man was way way too dangerous to release. He had struck hundreds of Talarian military positions during the conflict, cost thousands of lives, and had claimed all responsibility as part of his surrender, so he was a villain most high on Talaria itself, his capture a triumph of justice. Yet he had treated the men under his command well and this deserved some token of respect, even in prison. The Federation hadn’t opened a negotiation for his return in years, so it was unlikely he would be freed. No Talarian would be insane enough to opine the idea of releasing him, after the number of Talarian lives he had cost, before and after his capture.

No doubt, being a soldier of prison 8723 was stressful at all levels. This was what Lieutenant Sala Gabriel was very much aware of as she slipped invisibly along the bone dry walls of the atmospheric moat surrounding the prison. Above her Talarian soldiers in their brown padded uniforms were staunchly marching in routine drills along the outer walls meant to keep them in shape in the oft chance the lone prisoner inside would break free. The artificial gravity was heavy enough to keep them down in a proper march, the invisible atmospheric dome giving them air enough to chant battle chants as they marched. Their prisoner would not escape.

Sala hoped that he would not. It would put a dent in her plans to free him. She needed to follow these prison schematics exactly or her plan would fail. Being caught in the middle of the prison without a prisoner to break out would probably cost her everything, including her life. The Talarians had to keep _him_ alive, not so much her.

Like a panther in her skintight black uniform she slinked along the smooth stone wall, noting just how primitive the Talarian architectural structure was in comparison to the shiny metal prison block. These moats were a hallmark of Talaria’s very early warp drive successes, making outposts on these asteroids and building water sources to create artificial atmosphere and heat with during brief excursions beyond their star system. Asteroid rings stood between Talaria itself and the great expanse of space beyond their system, much like Earth had, and she had used the bouncing signals of the asteroid belt to beam undetected to the prison from her cloaked shuttle. A stolen Romulan cloak was a bit overkill for a small craft, but she had bigger plans for it, if her quarry was keen.

And he should be. He had been the one secretly sending out all those messages over the years without Talaria realizing what he was up to. If he could do all that from within prison, then the only barrier to his leaving the asteroid would have been lack of ship and this moat, which was about 40 meters of empty space between the prison and the invisible dome wall, with patrols of soldiers waiting to shoot from above. But this moat was the only access in and out of prison besides the main doors. Today she was hoping the dark shadow cast by the position of the asteroid would mask her coming and going along this moat, but she wasn’t hopeful yet that she could put her plan into action the way she intended it, which was why she had brought more than just herself.

Opening up her PADD, she double checked the schematic for the prison, and continued moving further along the wall, reaching the vent that would be her entrance into the prison. They would not exit that way. By then the guards would be aware of her presence, and this moat would start filling with heavy toxic gases, another protective measure against escape. She easily broke the security cypher for entrance into the vent, which is where the toxic gas would spew forth from should it be activated. She adjusted her atmospheric mask a little instinctively. All her skills and gifts could not keep her from natural human fear, and she prided herself on her courage so dearly that this moment of lapse revealed to her just how tense she had been since arriving.

 _Everything depends on this Sala,_ she thought to herself harshly, as she pushed back her long black locks from her face, and on a pause, retired them back neatly into the rest. _You know what you are doing, trust yourself. Trust in your blood._

Cursing her dreads and wanting them gone, she took a moment’s breath before resealing the vent door behind her, this time rewriting the cypher to prevent the men in the prison from being able to open the vents again. She took that moment to seal all the vents with her cyphers. She wouldn’t be able to escape this way again, but that was a part of her plan. It was do or die. 

Narrow tubes and crawl ways were not her favorite thing to navigate. At each access panel and hatch she carefully input her coded instructions into the Talarian prison system computer, tapping the interface keys with hard heavy jots of her fingertips.

_Easy girl, you’re still tense. Quietly, don’t damage anything…_

Sometimes she didn’t know her own strength. Case in point, as she broke the handle of the next hatchway in her haste to get through. A mental curse was the only thing she could give, who knew when a Talarian engineer might come down the tube to her location for repairs. She hoped they were all above her in the barracks sleeping. The night cycle she had chosen for this endeavor would not last much longer, and she had yet to reach her target.

At long last, she slid free of the guts of the prison into a proper hallway, carefully checked both ways with her eyes for unexpected patrols before activating the Dominion personal cloaking field she had brought with her. It wouldn’t last very long, she didn’t have the proper Dominion technology needed to recharge it, but it should fake them out when she was not in motion, at least long enough for an escape if she needed it.

But in motion she would be visible, which is why she had brought a third technology she had stolen from the Daystrom Institute; portable shield generators. She cupped one of the tiny spheres in her hand, mentally calculating the number she had brought as she checked her position on the schematic. Each was no bigger than a ping pong ball, and one time use, activate and go, but they would delay any patrols coming this way. She set one strategically just behind the hatchway where the hallway met a turn, and then continued down into the flickering darkness. Ducking and stopping, letting the Jem’Hadar shroud do its thing as a patrol passed, leaving a new shield in her path as she entered another hallway, and stopping again to input more instructions into the computer panels. She had timed the patrols and the path she was taking, it should be at least ten minutes before her first shield was discovered, but on the off chance that they strayed from their route she had some alternates mapped out on her screen. This prison was designed for one prisoner; most of these cells were dummies with holograms, very clever, but she was much more clever. The final device she pulled out was a simple, standard issue Starfleet Tricorder which she used to scan the route as she got closer to her target, tracking down the lone ‘human’ lifesign and the ‘ghost’ life signs they had placed into strategic positions in their prison to confuse her.

Even more clever. But a bit of fiddling with the tricorder saw around the fake signals. Talarians were experts at guerrilla warfare and setting traps. They HAD moved their prisoner to a different cell recently, and she mentally recalculated her route and recounted the spheres she had left, then sprung to her feet when a sudden alarm klaxon began sounding in the air. Her shields had been detected.

No more time to lose, it was now or nothing. The last hurdle was not the soldiers that came at her from around a corner, they were dealt with quickly as she dodged their phaser fire and threw a shield ball at their feet to reflect their fire back at their faces. She wasn’t going to engage yet. She had created a maze within their maze with her spheres as she had progressed deeper into the base and she wanted them to follow the path that she had created for them right into her trap.

Around a corner and down to the end and she put up two sets of shields to increase the time she would have to get things done. She didn’t know what condition the man would be in, Talarians weren’t excessively clever with torture, but they were brutal, and would disable prisoners severely to keep them from going anywhere.

The shielding on the cell was also clever. She could see him, but it was projecting a false image of a healthy sleeping prisoner. Knowing who he was, she was sure he would NOT be sleeping with the loud siren sounding above her. She could hear frantic Talarian engineering teams behind her trying to break through her experimental shields, but they were neglectfully sloppy as they worked frantically whilst simultaneously calling her names.

“Surrender mud alien! “Wench!” “Unnatural hag!” “Mudskin shrew!”

Sala mentally recoiled. She had forgotten that Talarians had a mostly monotone of skin colors and considered differences in skin colors as a sign of bad breeding. Weird birthmarks were considered evil enough to kill newborn children on this world. But she would not give into the mental need to lecture their primitive culture on racial equality, she had finally gotten through the innumerable cyphers on the cell door and was now at last standing in the prison proper, looking at the man himself.

Gaunt and malnourished, his silver hair was shorn down to his scalp in a prison cut, his skin pale and anemic from being out of the light for so long and pockmarked with scars and scratches, many had to have been self inflicted at some point. But his eyes...

“Well hello there,” said calmly, warmly, glassy purple eyes narrowing slightly in both relief and distrust as human memory slowly started to seep back into their empty depths. “It has been awhile since I’ve had human company here…”

Sala remembered what she had learned from his Starfleet psyche profile, his military record, and the medical charts that the Talarians had sent to Starfleet with their updates on the prisoner’s status, including the complete genetic screenings they had done to check for defects in his genetic make-up that might need repair. On Talaria, disability that could be fixed with genetics, would be, and that which couldn’t be fixed, resulted in sterilization or death.

But those tests had been the reason why Starfleet and the Federation had decided not to continue requesting this prisoner’s release, despite the treaty between their worlds requiring all prisoners to be returned to both sides.

Because Captain Samuel James Morgan was a Genetically Engineered human being. If his fluorescent purple eyes hadn’t been a clue to that fact, that he was already free of his magnetic cuffs, was reprogramming the cell door panel to keep the guards out, and was upright and on his feet despite two broken legs, was. Sala spurred into action, taking over the panel he had moved to and handing him a phaser from her belt instead.

“I’m Lieutenant Sala Gabriel, I’ve been getting your messages. They might get through before we can leave, so I hope you still know how to use one of those things...”

Captain Morgan chuckled, immediately lowering himself to a comfortably strategic position beside the door with his phaser at the ready. The Talarians had been tunneling into the wall just out of earshot; they would probably try to access through the jeffreys tubes, but Sala had locked out the moat vents for a reason.

She heard the startled cry, and the sounds of coughing Talarians crawling back out into the hallway as the first stage of her trap was activated. The toxic gas had nowhere to go now, and was backing up into the prison. She handed Morgan a respiratory filter, which he fixed quickly over his nostrils, then pulled out a second phaser and slipped down to sit neatly and comfortably beside Morgan, whose air of genuine but hostile mirth at the Talarian’s folly spoke layers as to his treatment here over the last ten years.

“Others?”

“No.”

“Ship?”

“Shuttle.”

“Nearby?”

“Remote.”

“Tactical?”

“None.”

“Shields?”

“And cloaked.”

“Nice. Transporter?”

“Beam bounce. Timed return.”

“Understood…Med kit?”

She smiled. He knew what questions to ask, and what her brief answers meant, and he willingly took the second phaser from her hand as she started pulling parts out of her pockets to begin assembling something much more lethal than a phaser…something that would turn Captain Samuel James Morgan into the dangerous weapon his records indicated he once was.

A syringe. She inserted the needle into her vein and pulled the plunger and she could see his eyes suddenly dancing in understanding.

“R1A or R2B-?”

“R1A,” she acquiesced as she handed him the syringe of her blood.

Regenerative blood types weren’t a common thing amongst Augments, especially due to their negative connotation with the Eugenics wars, so geneticists generally stuck to only two most commonly engineered regenerative blood types, which also masked their identity by showing themselves as either A type blood or B- blood during medical scans. This prevented them from being discovered during the blood donor process as these blood types weren’t as needed, were severely common and could be replicated. R2B- was preferred since it was harder to detect in scans and could bring someone back even after death. Khanblood, it was called. BUT Sala counted herself lucky that she had regenerative blood type at all. Samuel Morgan didn’t.

She could already see the lines in Morgan’s face filling in as the presence of her blood began the regeneration process in his body. She helped him set his leg bones properly as the regenerative effect reached his legs, then watched amusedly as the two Talarian engineers now worked hard at opening the cell door, the numbers of Talarian guards entering the area swelling to include the entire platoon.

Her remote transport timer beeped, indicating that it was time to depart.

“Shall we go then?” Sala said, standing comfortably and pocketing her phaser as she took back her other phaser from him to sheath into her belt.

“Lets…”

The Talarians looked up at them in malace and...sudden understanding. Something instinctive in the lines of their bodies...How they were looking at each other, revealing how little the two Augments cared about them as Sala took out her remote and activated the virus she had coded into the prison’s computer systems the moment she had first arrived.

She almost felt sorry for them as the atmospheric dome around the Prison collapsed and their twin forms disappeared into the static of a transporter beam. The Talarians had never been in control of this situation.

Their fate had been sealed from the moment Morgan had arrived at the prison. They should have known.

Caged birds never sing.


	2. The Fallen Angels

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I suck at summaries, and any summary I give would probably spoil everything, so I'll just stick to the official story summary itself to describe what is going on. Also, if I had waited any longer and done anymore editing, I don't think this would have turned out very well, so it may be very bad. What can you expect at 3 am? Yaaaaay, insomnia!!

_Blee-dee-beep!_

Silence. The thrum of ship systems and functions continuing on their usual throbbing rhythms behind the walls were of little solace as he waited in silence for the logical repeat request upon his door chime soon to follow.

_Blee-dee-beep!_

Somebody was here to see him. Binary processes began churning out the computations of the thousands of functions and processes of his brain which occurred upon the release of his neural net from the last grasping fingers of the programs that kept him deeply in the android equivalent of slumber, the cessation of his dream program, or, in this case, a nightmare, one that he was relieved to be rid of. He had been trying to untangle himself from this dream all night because androids did not get fevers, and now he was not sure how he was meant to react to the very real fever he was feeling still. Androids did not feel hot or cold. They could discern hot and cold temperatures, but the pain resulting from being hot and cold was not something he should have been capable of. And this was why he had not wanted to answer the door chime. He was still trying to unravel the dream from his waking reality, because in dreams he COULD feel. And touch. And feel pain. The broiling, fevered heat...he could still feel it...but his skin was cold to touch...

_Blee-dee-beep!_

“Enter!” he snapped, and regretted it immediately, feeling the lack of fabric on his body almost as an admonition that he was not ready for his guest to enter his personal quarters. 

His tone was also wrong, as his emotion chip had given up the first obvious response to an unwanted guest during an awkward moment, but which was not necessarily the right emotional tone to use. He knew who the visitor was and he wanted to see her, of course he did, he had these sessions saved into his internal chronometer. His record keeping systems were ready to begin logging and recording his behaviours and reactions at the appointed times in their conversations.

_The best laid plans of mice and men..._

The point was lost in the maze of his throbbing mind as counselor Deanna Troi walked into his bedroom, took one look at the messy state of said room and shook her head. The session was starting now, in her mind had probably started the moment she realized he had not answered the chimes at their accustomed time, and there was no stopping her once she was in counselor mode. Which was always.

“Did you have another bad dream Data?”

“Affirmative,” he tightly drew the sheets back up over himself. “Would you please give me a moment to...put on some more suitable clothing?”

Troi looked at him for a moment, and realized at that precise moment that he was not wearing any clothes under the rather...thin blankets. She smiled, almost amused, and turned to give him privacy.

“Of course Data…” she was barely holding back a laugh. Why nudity was such a subject of abject humor Data could not be sure, but his creator had been forced to create a program in order to prevent such misunderstandings from occurring, and he felt rather embarrassed to have been caught out in such an improper state despite the program.

All he could find in the mess of his bedroom was a pair of pajama pants and his red velvet dressing gown, a gift from Commander LaForge one Christmas, which matched the one he had worn during his performance of Ebenezer Scrooge. He had also been gifted these pajamas, which were printed with a pattern of smoking pipes and magnifying glasses, an allusion to his interest in Sherlock Holmes. The holodeck was of little interest to him now, though he remembered fondly how...fascinated he had been with the idea of solving a mystery in Victorian England.

The only mystery to him now was how his emotion chip, his dream program, and this unknown ‘fever’ dream had resulted in his orderly bedroom becoming unwound into such utter...confusion. His unconscious response to feeling hot had been to disrobe in his sleep, a futile gesture, but his android brain could not discern the fictional world of his dreams from real life. He must have been through all his drawers looking for the thinnest, but most modest, article of clothing to feel cool in during his fever, and he had at some point failed and resigned himself to nudity. But it was all to no avail. The fever was in his mind, not his skin and clothing could not change this. 

He affixed the red velvet robes around himself, pajama pants pulled on hastily as an afterthought, and stumbled out of the room.

_Sh-crinch!_

Broken glass, under his toes. He ignored it and continued out to the living area, where he found Troi examining a painting that he had smashed on the floor in anger the other day. He paused a moment to feel that brief injection of glass shards into the bottoms of his feet to see if he was badly damaged. There was no pain. He had a fever, but he felt no pain of any kind, and the fever was slowly slipping away again. The glass shards were the remains of a statue, abstract artwork once gifted to him by Jenna D’Sora so long ago. That relationship seemed laughable now, almost comical by comparison to his present situation.

“Please sit councillor. Would you like something to drink? Tea?”

“No thank you, Data,” she pulled his uniform jacket off the padded lounge chair she preferred to sit in when she visited and picked up the book lying under it to read the spine before she sat down.

Data replicated himself a tea, but he hadn’t requested any kind in particular, and it was a new personality trait that he had not expected to creep into his routine so he had not yet decided on a preferred blend, but knew he much preferred loose leaf to bagged and a little bit of sweetener. He was now often inclined to just get a cup of tea, sit and drink when he was emotionally stressed. But was this personality trait going to remain, or be discarded and replaced with something different?

And that was the crux of the entire situation wasn’t it? He couldn’t choose which personality trait samples his emotion chip was choosing to base its reactions off of, and his personality was now beginning to form in earnest, the permanent facsimile of what humans called ‘identity’. Or ‘self-expression.’ Emotions...were meant to be unpredictable. He couldn’t even begin to try! But he had so many samples of emotional reactions that could result in a response that it was starting to overwhelm him. And these emotional experiments would result in permanent changes in his positronic matrix that would define who he was for the rest of his existence. 

“I can sense you’re feeling stressed Data.”

“I can hardly deny that,” Data admitted, pulling his uniform pants and shoes off the couch in order to sit next to her. His newly replicated cup of tea was placed down next to the book she had put down on the coffee table; a book of poetry gifted to him by Doctor Crusher. At least he had left these things intact.

“Tell me about your nightmare. Was it that bad?”

She pointed at him generally, as he had begun to pick the shards of glass out of his feet with his fingernails. He noticed her concerned gaze at this, feeling once again embarrassed to be caught so obviously distracted in his actions, and without socks on, and wondered if maybe the modesty program was more trouble than it was worth to maintain...

“It was better than the Borg dream, but worse than the self-destruct dream sequence, the one I couldn’t wake up from…”

“I see. What was this dream about?”

“A fever…no...well” He shook his head, touching his own body to check. “It felt real, but it was not. This feeling of having a fever...perhaps. But having never had a fever nor feeling pain from touching a heat source before, I can only describe this experience as…boiling alive. I do not think this is what my creator intended for me. He created my dream program as a way for me to experience human creativity…This dream does not seem...to have a logical reason for existing. Or even an illogical one.”

Troi’s beautiful features crinkled up into an expression of thoughtful concern.

“The bad dream aspect of your program began before your suspension, but I wonder if the last two days of self-isolation hasn’t made it worse, resulting in this dream somehow?”

“I am not in any particular need for sustained company, counselor, if that is what you mean,” Data said, dismayed by the stiff sarcasm creeping into his voice. “Being alone in my quarters should not bother me to the extent where it affects my dream program…”

Or should it? The tea was darjeeling and he did not like this tea very much at all, but he drank it to distract from his turmoiled emotional state. Perhaps he would ‘learn to love it’, as the expression went.

“Well Data, when humans undergo bad circumstances, our dreams can often reflect those changes. Anger and passion can manifest many ways in dreams, fever is just one of them. And when we are angry, we can sometimes take that anger out on physical objects,” she indicated the damaged painting. “And avoid contact with others for fear of hurting them too.”

“Counselor,” he looked up at her harshly, ready with his denial, then felt his sudden swelling of anger melting into regret at the cold firmness of her eyes. “I am fine.”

“You can lie Data, I know that much about you, but you can’t lie to me,” she said, firmly. “You do feel angry. And hurt. And it's not going to get any better now that you’re suspended from duty for the next two weeks. You have the right to feel angry. ”

“But I am not angry.”

Her eyes kept his fixed for many moments, and she must have sensed the battle going on between the various programs in his mind as his emotion chip finally settled on the appropriate emotional reaction to her response.

“Damn,” he put his hands in his face in misery as frustration welled up into his chest.

“Data,” Troi eased herself onto the couch next to him, putting a hand on his knee. “This isn’t your fault. You could not have expected what would happen if your connection to the Captain were to be used in a battle situation. Nobody is blaming you for saving all of our lives, we are all quite grateful for what you did.”

“But they ARE blaming me for Ensign Reagan’s injury,” Data stated as fact, wiping away the liquid from his cheeks that had been released by his emotion chip as the frustration finally boiled over. “They are blaming me for her request for transfer because transferring me would have been fairer by far and the Captain does not want me to transfer.”

“Of course not. And your friends don’t want you to leave either. And while her injury was, indeed, your fault, you did apologize,” Troi said, her eyes looking momentarily introspective. “Admiral Nacheyev did not need to suspend you from duty after the fact, you had already been reprimanded by the Captain and the situation had been dealt with. It was an overreaction to discovering your shared secret and you are justified in feeling wronged by the Admiral.” 

Was she thinking back to that day, as he had been for the last two, when the Jem’Hadar vessel was plowing towards them, Ensign Reagan frozen in her chair, and the Captain’s mind, suddenly projecting through the Borg collective consciousness…?

_‘...Frozen?...Suicide run!...Helm Data! Helm!!!’_

“No, we couldn’t have predicted it at all,” Troi added again. “What you both did in the heat of battle...was instinct Data, an obvious reaction to danger. And our instincts don’t always result in the ideal solutions to the problems presented to us.”

Data could well understand. Throwing Ensign Reagan harshly from the helm seat and taking her position was indeed instinct, a response to a critical threat that could have destroyed the _Enterprise_. Common sense would have been to transfer helm control to his own station...but there wouldn’t have been time. There was no easy solution he could find that could have resulted in _Enterprise_ surviving had he NOT thrown her...and broken her arm in the process.

“I do not think Admiral Nacheyav would have been as harsh in her decision as she was had we been honest from the beginning about the link between us. And our growing dependency upon it.”

We being Data and Captain Picard. Right now, he realized, the Captain was having tea, which was probably why he had taken to doing the same around the same time in the morning…He now knew without knowing what the captain was doing nearly every hour of every day. It was rather disconcerting. 

“Data, how do you feel? Being connected to the Captain?”

How did he feel?

“I am not really sure how to describe what I feel counselor. It is a very different feeling, being in a collective. You lose a bit of yourself...and yet gain a bit of the other person in return. I half do not know some days whether my emotions are my own, or the Captain’s.”

“So you’re also feeling what the Captain feels at times? It must be hard to tell yourself from someone else when you are still forming a personality of your own.”

Indeed. Was he adapting the Captain’s feelings and behaviors and combining them with his own? Adding the Captain to his personal collective consciousness? Forming a set of personality traits based solely on the Captain?

The teacup sat in front of him as an admonition. 

“Oh….”

It hit him like two asteroids colliding in space. The idea of assimilating the Captain’s personality the way the Borg assimilate people suddenly filled his stomach with an acidic feeling, bile rising...

“You will find a way to block this connection, Data,” Troi said, looking around, potentially for a waste receptacle...had she sensed his sudden nausea? “Or a way to control it.” She found a waste basket near his computer station, but the feeling had subsided by the time she sat the basket in front of him. “And...as to the stress and the bad dreams, well it's only natural to feel angry, hurt, and resentful when you are put on suspension from duty when the other person is not.”

“He is the captain,” Data replied ironically as he turned his empty teacup around in his fingers “He made the tactical decision, but I caused the injury. At least it was not permanent…”

“That’s right. And Ensign Reagan did not ever indicate to me that she felt upset at you in any form. She requested transfer because she _couldn’t_ handle the battlefield stress, and _did_ freeze up at the helm. A long break on a more peaceful assignment might be a better fit for her.”

Data was somehow not convinced that this was true, but he had instinctively began tidying his quarters in response to the end of their session drawing to its inevitable conclusion. The unspoken violence of the last 48 hours against his personal belongings made itself known as he picked up the remaining pieces of glass from the carpet and gathered up books with torn pages. Thankfully these ones were replicated books. He would never forgive himself for ruining a gift from one of his close friends. Yet he did not feel guilty about the glass statue he had thrown across the room. He had secretly hated the gift from Jenna. It reminded him of a time when he was more innocent, a time he sometimes wished he could go back to…

“Councillor, there was one other thing I wanted to ask you about…before you go.”

“Yes?” she turned to look at him knowingly. He tried to calm his facial expression into something neutral, and was probably failing, for she smiled. “You want to know about Savil?”

“Is she...upset with me?”

“I don’t think so. I think she’s giving you space right now..the space you’ve basically asked for by not communicating with anyone.”

“It is hard to know or understand what an appropriate response from her would be. I have only ever interacted with her in ten forward...or in the science lab.”

“So she’s never visited your quarters before has she?”

He would have blushed if he could.

Memory, sweet memory, a quiet courageous moment where he bucked off all of his friends’ advice to avoid contact and had sat down with the insular Vulcan science officer to talk about their next assignment. Her lack of emotional responses did nothing to dissuade him, and his growing emotional maturity had seemed to fascinate her completely. The relationship was a stark contrast to his first, spontaneous romantic encounter with the late Natasha Yar under the effects of the polywater intoxication. Nor was this like his failed romantic experiment with Jenna D’Sora. This was genuine attraction, at least on his part, and something he himself had instigated as a result of said ‘crush’, as Geordi had called it. That attraction. Real emotional attraction. At least he hoped it was. He could have been second guessing himself again. He had been doing a lot of that lately. But he wanted it to be real, which meant it had to be, in a sense, a want of his. This need for romance.

“I am still feeling rather ashamed, and rather sure that she will not want to be with someone who...did what I did.”

Tears again. He hated crying, he really did, the tears never really made sense. His chip was doing things opposite to how he had been feeling before when he had cried. Before he had been angry to have been so wronged, suspended after saving their ship, their lives. Frustrated. But now, he felt guilty, and ashamed, but only in response to what Savil would think. How must she have been spoken to by crew members? There would be many questions about him, no doubt. Was she still going to attend the play with him? Did she still care? Had she ever cared? It was harder to tell with Vulcans than with humans, but he did have some understanding of how Vulcans indicated the value they placed on the presence of other people in their lives. So why the tears? It was illogical. Savil would say so.

“Data...I think you should ask her yourself. These are important things to share with a partner. That you feel bad about what you did shows your humanity. Anyone who _didn’t_ feel bad would not have to second guess themselves the way you are right now. You are still learning the difference between emotions and instinct, and how they work together, and instinct is something even humans have trouble controlling.”

Resignation was how he would describe the complex emotional response to this comment, as his shoulders sagged, and he let out a slow breath.

“Thank you Counselor, I will talk to her. And I will try not to blame myself too...harshly...for my instincts. At least not until I have more control over them.”

“Control takes time to learn, and now you have a conveniently allotted two weeks of it.” Troi’s voice was apologetic in reminding him of his disciplinary enforced lack of duties, and she added. “You still have friends Data, people are just a little shy right now not knowing your emotional state. So talk to them, let them know you want to see them, that it’s okay, especially Savil. Vulcans need these easy cues from emotional beings. Logically people would want to be alone after being punished, that is what she would expect. But I know you too well. You want to talk to about these emotions you are experiencing for the first time.”

His smile was real, his gratitude was genuine, and he thanked Troi honestly before she left. His quarters were starting to look a little neater, and the computer had initiated the cleaning program, ridding his carpet of remaining shards of glass. Which was good, as Spot finally had the grace to slip back out of the loose ventilation shaft cover where she had been hiding for two days to return to her bed beside the couch. He felt bad for neglecting his friendship with her as well, and reached over to give her head a gentle scratch. Her purr was a lovely reward, but he would have to re-affix the shaft cover to prevent her from escaping again.

Which reminded him...

“Computer, replicate engineering standard repair kit”

He would repair the exoskin on his feet as well, put on some socks, and the rest of his clothing, and contact Savil for a heart to heart conversation with her about his feelings. He knew she would be interested in hearing about his experiences. She was honest about her fascination with the emotions of other people, and him in particular. He picked up the book from the coffee table to return to its shelf then stopped himself at a sudden, unexpected thought…

_I wonder if Savil would enjoy hearing me recite some poetry?_

~~~~~~

_Beep! Beep! Beep!_

Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the starship _Enterprise_ darted his eyes up from the book of poems he was reading as his computer monitor began to rise automatically in response to the urgent subspace message coming into his console. Noting that it was a real time message, he opened the signal and was immediately greeted by the stern yet friendly features of Captain Edward Jellico of the Federation Starship _Cairo_ , who smiled wryly upon his coming into view.

“Jean-Luc, I hear you’re on your way to Parliament too?”

“We are.” said Picard with a smile, knowing that Captain Jellico was someone who did not waste time. His pronunciation of Jean-Luc sounded more like John Look, but Picard could easily forgive him this small sin. Here was a man who couldn’t pronounce half the names of the planets whose people he had protected over the decades, the worlds which Starfleet had decorated him innumerable times for fighting against, and the worlds which he had made First Contact with and had returned to on a regular basis despite not being required to. Jellico’s reputation for getting things done and making sure they stayed done could forgive him anything like a mispronounced name.

“I’m already there. We’ve just learned that the Bajoran dignitary who was going to be mediating this conference, and the Starfleet doctor appointed to care for her, have both gone missing en route to Parliament. I got Ambassadors and Admirals all up in arms about it, and I can’t blame them. A shuttlecraft I tell ya!”

“A shuttlecraft?” Picard said in rising concern. “Do you mean to tell me the most important dignitary involved in this peace conference was travelling to Parliament in a shuttlecraft?”

While Parliament had agreed to act as host for the conference, being that they were Federation the other parties had requested a non-Federation world mediate, a Bajoran, mostly due to Bajor’s reputation now of being the ‘world with the wormhole’. And Bajor had only agreed to act as third party arbitration after the Federation had convinced them that it would be safer to be away from Dominion dominated Cardassia for the negotiations, that the distance to travel would be worth it. Especially with the Dominion making friendly overtures to the xenophobic Tholians by offering to protect their space, a message Tholia probably was happy to hear. The Federation needed a stronger message.

And it just so happened to fall to Picard and to transport Admirals and many of the other Federation dignitaries that would be involved in these discussions, which had put him into the situation of having his second officer on ice, and his relationship with Admiral Nacheyev icier than usual.

“To be fair, the shuttle belongs to the _Farragut_ and it was an emergency situation...”

“Ah yes, I remember, Captain Entei’s ship.” Captain Entei of the _Farragut_ was usually to be found en route to or from Bajor, and was probably no stranger to dealing with the Dominion. “What was the emergency that resulted in their needing to transport by shuttlecraft?”

“According to Parliament’s people the _Farragut_ spotted Dominion ships in Federation space ready to intercept and her Captain decided to send the Ambassador and her doctor on to Parliament ahead of them to keep them safely away from the battlezone.”

“And of course the shuttle is missing anyway...”

“And with Dominion activity on the rise around these parts you can put two and two together. I have a bad feeling about all of this, Jean-Luc. I never should have agreed to come to Parliament.”

“Oh really?” he raised an eyebrow, sensing that Jellico was going to say something that would amuse him and being quite ready for it.

“They keep throwing me at these conferences and fancy get togethers for a reason. They want to make me an Admiral damnit! But I like my chair just where it is, on a Starship, not in an office on a Starbase somewhere in the middle of nowhere!”

Picard could not stop himself from laughing. Edward Jellico was a firebrand tactician and set in his militaristic way of doing this. He was probably feeling some pressure to give up the chair and let younger heads take on the task of fighting the Dominion, which would not sit well with the other man he was sure of it. Picard was in much the same situation with Nacheyev. But an old friend had once given him some very strong advice with regards to becoming an admiral.

_‘Don't let them promote you. Don't let them transfer you. Don't let them do anything that takes you off the bridge of that ship, because while you're there, you can make a difference.’_

But there would be time for woolgathering later.

“I had a feeling when I saw your face that I was also going to regret coming to Parliament,” Picard joked cordially, their relationship as Captains having evolved to the point where they could joke about such things. “Did they tell you how many Dominion ships were spotted at the border by the _Farragut_?”

“Two, at least, but you never know with the Dominion, they move fast. If you don’t pick up any traces of the shuttlecraft on your way into Parliament space then we can assume it went way off route. I’m going to be moving in your direction as I search, we can pow-wow and share our findings when you reach me, if you don’t reach Parliament first. The Starfleet doctor’s name is Julian Bashir, and the Bajoran Ambassador is Els Renora. She’s over a hundred years old and probably needed a Doctor just to keep her going long enough to get to Parliament. But Bajor said she was the best, so she’s the one who they sent. I have a really bad feeling about this conference in general though. Things just do not add up.”

“Why the Federation would send a dignitary to Parliament from as far away as Bajor to start with?” Picard said calmly, injecting rationality into the argument. “There are dangerous enemies out there besides Jem’Hadar, especially so close to the Tholian border. Bajor isn’t the only third party that Parliament could have sent for.”

“Someone who didn’t need constant medical care and support,” Jellico agreed.

“Yes, and I recognize the Doctor’s name now, Bashir. He’s the CMO of Deep Space Nine, I believe.” Picard checked a nearby PADD, bringing up the man’s records to confirm, and then was shocked that he was blocked in doing so. “Is this what I think it is?”

“Classified. Everything about this doctor is classified except his name,” Jellico complained. “See if you can convince Admiral Nacheyev or Saduk to open the record for us, before I run off looking for this guy and his patient. I don’t want to risk life and limb to find he was on a secret mission, is safe, and I’m not supposed to be after him in the first place.”

Picard laughed outright. Leave it to Jellico to already know the names of all the dignitaries and Admirals on board the _Enterprise_ and find a way to use _him_ to leverage _them_ in some way.

“I’m afraid neither Admiral is exactly thrilled to be on board _my_ ship at the moment, I may not be able to convince either of them, but I shall do my tacit best.”

“Excellent, I’ll contact you again in 24 hours with an update.”

“Agreed. Good hunting to you Captain!”

“And to you too, Captain. Hopefully this will be little more than an exercise in testing the patience of starship captains. Jellico out.”

The console screen blinked off as the transmission closed. Picard chuckled, then spared one more glance for Bashir’s file. The bright red REDACTED across the box where the text should be was making his stomach squirm in that strange way that indicated that something wasn’t quite right, but he couldn’t put a name on it quite yet. Rising to his feet and stalking out to the bridge he began to snap out quick orders to the bridge crew.

“Helm, change speed to warp 3,” he said as he headed straight to his chair. “Alter course on a search pattern towards Parliament space. Michaels, begin yellow alert and keep phasers at the ready, Dominion activity was been reported in Parliament space...”

“Yes captain.”

“Anything in particular we should be looking for sir?”

This question was from the OPS duty officer, Junior Lieutenant Jeremiah Chalmers, a young man with a dual screen clear VISOR headpiece over his eyes and very long spidery limbs that gave him the wrong impression of being taller than he was. He was also both doing double duty as OPS officer and supporting Engineer to the Bridge, all the duties Data would be doing if he wasn’t suspended, and Chalmers was doing these 2nd officer level duties with unexpected competence and skill for someone his age. He was barely out of Starfleet Academy...

"A shuttlecraft, or the remains of one. Activate long range sensors to search for Starships as well, the _Farragut_ and the _Cairo_ are also both out searching and we don’t want to lose sight of either of them...in the process.”

“Yes sir.”

Commander Riker sat down heavily in his chair and stared at the empty viewscreen before them gravely as Picard quietly explained to him the situation.

“I have a feeling I’m not going to like where we’re headed,” Riker said at last with a heavy intake of breath.

“I have the same feeling, Number One. Well, I’d better go inform the Admirals of our new route. You have the bridge. Keep me informed I have a feeling this will take some...time.”

Riker gave him a sympathetic look as he vacated his chair. But this was more important than having to sit through another of Nacheyev’s accusatory lectures, or Saduk’s passive not-smiling retorts in support of her distress. One missing shuttlecraft could mean the difference between a peaceful negotiations on Parliament, and a breakdown of friendships between worlds that had existed for ages. Only time would tell.

~~~~~

Julian Bashir could not, for the life of him, work out how he had managed to keep them both alive considering the current state of their shuttlecraft, but they were. Ambassador Els Renora was surprisingly strong and robust given her years, accepting help out of the burning craft from him as they vacated its smoking shell, willingly accepting the supplies and bags he threw down to her from within after he had climbed back inside, and carrying them away from the craft to prevent them from potentially igniting should the shuttle become engulfed in flame. Then she sat on the ground near the supplies while Julian threw parts of a much heavier transmitter system onto the ground from the back of the shuttle, somehow knowing she would not be able to carry these despite how easily he tossed them to the ground like they were sacks of food packets, instead keeping a safe distance so as not to be in the way of his frenzy of post-crash productivity.

She was watching him cautiously, had been assessing him constantly since they left Bajor, and he kept darting eyes back to her, making sure she was safe, and that the perimeter was secure. Their shuttle was nose down in the churned up earth with smoke rising from its engines and nacelles, threatening to blow. The doctor had just enough time left to activate the force fields around the shuttle engines to snuff out the oxygen supply before the fire could ignite the fuel supply and maybe blow up the entire forest where they had crashed, and them with it. Everything was going almost too perfectly in their favor for a shuttlecraft crash.

“Doctor,” said Ambassador Els as he started assembling the emergency transmitter. “I’m not getting any younger and we seem to have crashed near a pathway of some kind. I’m going to go see where it leads and hope that it leads to shelter.”

“Take a phaser with you,” Julian said immediately, throwing one towards her, knowing she was experienced and skilled enough to know how to use it. “Bring one survival pack with you as well, I’ll catch up to you with the rest of the supplies. There was a town or village I spotted as we were going down, the path probably leads to it.”

“Well let’s thank the Prophets that I’m a skilled negotiator Doctor because who knows how peaceful the local peoples might be.”

“Rubicun III, home of the Edo people, a very pacifist race, granted their sole punishment for crimes committed is the death penalty. One moment…” before she could start climbing up the damp grass embankment to the path he pulled out a tricorder and his medical kit. “I’ll inoculate you against any kind of poison they might use for disciplinary purposes, the toxins on this planet have been recorded as being very mild actually, compared to the rest of the Federation.”

“Somehow doctor you aren’t quite reassuring me as to how well we’re going to fair on their world.”

“Well you are a respected and skilled negotiator Ambassador, I’m sure we’ll fair all right,” he rejoined with a teasing smile.

“I do not find that amusing Doctor Bashir,” she retorted, but there was indeed amusement in her eyes. They had been building up a rapport of sorts on their way to Parliament, but he found she was hard to read at times and the usual human ways of guessing people’s reactions were not holding up to snuff. He would have to employ more...advanced techniques in keeping their barbs and jibes along more friendly lines.

It took approximately ten minutes to assemble the pieces of the emergency transmitter, connect it to the shuttle’s primary power source so that it would run continuously. He set out a visual message to show which direction they had gone in, drawing an arrow in the grass with his phaser before shouldering the supply packs and climbing stiffly up the hill, the packs balanced upon both shoulders as if he were carrying heavy sacks of potatoes. Close enough, one of his sacks had the food, the other medical supplies. His backpack contained the emergency tent and work tools, his own survival pack, a pair of thermal blankets and a second set of clothing should the temperature drop. It was autumn on this part of Edo so the temperature was likely to drop a lot. Rain had damped the grass recently, and wind was churning up the dead leaves on the ground, scattering them along the neatly paved paths along their route.

Ambassador Els hadn’t travelled far before deciding to stop and wait for him at the top of a hill overlooking the settlement nearest their crash site, and as the doctor came up next to stand beside her he very quickly realized why she had stopped.

“Good heavens!” he declared, his stomach suddenly flipping in his chest.

“No Doctor, I would certainly not describe it that way,” she responded, still sardonic even in her sorrow.

Before them across the valley was spread the dark charred remains of vast farmland torn to pieces by orbital phaser fire. Bodies were scattered along the side of the pathways, occasionally the bodies were hidden beneath white blankets that somebody had thoughtfully tucked around them as if to keep the dead warm as they slept. Julian felt his feet moving leadenly along the path, the Ambassador also shuffling, though hers was more due to old age and tiredness than not, for he guessed probably correctly that she had seen such scenes as this many times in her life under the occupation. It did not lessen the horror of the situation, only that she had the presence of mind not to speak of it, but to simply endure it as they walked.

Julian was horrified enough for sixteen people. Those that would have died in the blast would have been vaporized, but these bodies showed signs of what looked like radiation burns and lesions on their faces and open sores. However, had he detected overwhelming signs of radiation in the planet’s atmosphere he would not have chosen this planet, or this region, to make the emergency crash landing, there were other sites he might have been able to reach. This site had shown up on his sensors as safe, sparsely populated flat land surrounded by foothills. He pulled out his tricorder briefly to scan the bodies as he passed them, noting their gentle faces, the neatly tended hair, a loose sandal on one foot, stained white clothing carefully pinned upon flawless forms. Even in death the Edo showed the beauty of a once proud race brought to its knees by what could only be a virus, a very, very deadly virus from the looks of the body count.

“Do not touch the bodies Ambassador, I don’t know how this virus might spread…”

“I understand Doctor. Perhaps we should ask for more information from that young man down there?”

Julian looked up and saw where she was pointing. A man, a living man, was sitting weeping next to one of the bodies, his brown work clothing was sooty from mud and his skin was lesioned with the signs of his own sickness. There were a few other survivors down the road passed him, all in various stages of carrying bodies and laying them along the road, all dressed in brown. If Julian remembered correctly, Edo wore different colors to indicate the tasks that they were currently in charge of, brown for manual laborers and farmers, blue for security and white for those who were off duty. The Edo all looked up at them as they approached, showing no signs that they were concerned for the foreigners on their world. There were about twenty in total.

“It is too late to help us,” said the man. “We are cursed. God is no longer protecting us.”

“What has happened here?” Els asked gently, but firmly, and his eyes briefly took in the shape of her Bajoran nose before his eyes welled over with more tears.

“We did not ask anything of our God but to guide us. But these invaders, they cared not for our God or our ways. Look there at their heresy!”

He flailed a hand in their direction, and for a moment Julian assumed the man was pointing at them for some reason. But Ambassador Els logically turned to look back at the direction they had come from, and swore an oath in Bajoran that would not translate across their communicators for how graphic it was. Julian was well in agreement with her sentiment. Behind them was the hulking mass of what could only have once been an orbital space station, a giant beast of a black and gray metal that twisted across the Edo valley like the broken body of some ancient, fallen…

“God...there lay our God. We could not save Him. We did not obey Him. And now we are all cursed. We are cursed.”

Els Renora began chanting a Bajoran death chant over the complete devastation they were bare witness too. Edo’s protector lay a complete and utter ruin, resting in pieces on the ground. Thanks to the Dominion, the Edo God was nothing more than a broken mess tossed down upon the landscape like a child’s discarded plaything.

Anger suddenly swelled up inside of Julian Bashir, anger like he had never felt, and he swore an oath that he would keep these people from meeting the same fate. He would cure this virus that infected them, or die trying.

_I swear it!_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDIT: I discovered after the fact that I had been referring to the Bajoran Ambassador as Renora, officially, but Bajoran family names come BEFORE their given name, so she would be Ambassador Els, Renora being her given name, Els being her family name. I have since fixed the problem. You might not have even noticed. But it was important to me, and I got to test the editing process within the Archive of Our Own software. Thank you!


	3. The Melting of Glaciers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ~Chapter titles are my big weakness. I suck at them almost as much as I suck at story descriptions. I will also be the first person to admit that when I start to write something at midnight it will probably not turn out all right. I think this story is turning out alright, but I have reached an impasse and it may be time between chapters as I figure out how to get ideas in my mind into a text form rather than seeing them as musical numbers or movie action sequences. I also have no idea if people like this or hate this, or if I should rewrite bits, or just keep going, or scrap the whole thing. Critical (not insulting) feedback IS welcome.
> 
> Also I’m using Stellar Cartography for my Star Trek map system of choice, of course, because it's the best imho. The Memory Alpha and Memory Beta wikis for background information and to get details right, like the spelling of Talarian (so many ‘arian’ species in Star Trek, lol)
> 
> Finally, this is not a sappy quick love story. This is a long epic conflict with romances (plural) and betrayals and alliances and everything like that. I put a billion pairings in the description stuff because I wanted to cover all my potential bases. First base, second base...home run...lol. :P

A typical day for science officer Lieutenant Savil usually was very neatly arranged. Alarm at 0600 hours. Dressed and meditations until 0700, breakfast and then more meditation or reading until her duties started at 0800. Lunch break began at 1200 hours, and then she was back on shift from 1300 until 1700, when she was free for the evening. Leisure activities would include reading in her quarters, working on her botany project in the laboratory, tending her share of the garden in the arboretum, or else physical activities in the holodeck to keep in shape. She had joined counselor Troi’s fitness classes as a way of involving herself in activities that other crew members participated in. Isolation was a factor of being a Vulcan officer on a primarily non-Vulcan ship that she was well aware of. Chess with Lieutenant Barclay was also a new pastime, who was considered unusual by many, but he had a good mind and strategic thinking when he wasn’t distracted by imagined illnesses or self-conscious about his personal conduct or appearance. She typically ate dinner in ten forward with fellow crew members from her shift when she was doing activities outside of her quarters. She would change out of her uniform upon returning to her quarters, and tend to her plants. Reading and meditations and a sonic shower before bed would prepare her for the night’s sleep. She went to bed at 22:00 hours.

It was the time she spent on her days off that was a little more difficult, much like today, as she had found herself sitting in her quarters, waiting for Commander Data to contact her, to meet her in ten forward for a meal and company as he sometimes did on her free days. But he had not done so yet, and the book she was reading was one she had read before. She favored reading something new each time, to broaden her knowledge. She usually passed the novels she had read onto other colleagues. But Data had replicated this book for his own reading and handed it to her in ten forward the week before, curious about her opinion on it. Now she was hoping to return it to him, so they could discuss it.

_No. This...is an illogical course of action. He now has a serious disciplinary breach on his record, has spent two days in isolation, and is likely in a mood only to be comforted in that strange human-like way, by sharing his mind and his feelings with me. Trying to turn the conversation to academic topics would be...unkind._

Savil had a great deal of difficulty dealing with Data’s emotions, more so than with humans because he was still developing emotions in the way of a small child. His intellectual mind was something that Vulcans would constantly strive towards, but emotional consciousness and to be seen as human was what he had craved. She respected that, he was certainly more human than some, devoting a great deal of his free time to human pursuits.

It made his interest in her unique, for a being seeking out emotional stimulus and human experience would be illogical to choose a Vulcan. But then she had noticed how human males did seem to have a keen interest in female Vulcans, regardless of their emotional distance. Savil was not ignorant to the effect she knew she had on human males, her form was considered ‘ideal’ by the human females she had talked to.

In fact, she had asked some female friends of her why they believed she might have been chosen by Data as a potential romantic partner, and Ensign Reagan had piped up,

“Well, you’re very pretty. No, you are! You really are!”

 _But this reason would mean Data’s interest is purely physical attraction. I do not believe we are at that stage in our...relationship...yet he still remains. Those interested only in physical pursuits would not have remained still._

But here she was, stuck with large blocks of her day empty and no duties to perform and her significant other was isolating himself.

_Perhaps I should visit his quarters…or perhaps I should find some other activity for my day._

Being that she was Vulcan, having free days meant that she had to be a little more creative in her pursuits on those days than when her day was scheduled perfectly. After 0800 she had to make her own decisions about what her day would involve, beyond her usual morning routine. And Data had in fact helped her with that, something to which she was very grateful.

For example, the ship’s theatre group put on plays regularly, and it was something she and Data could now do together. He was also a frequent performer with the group, though he had declined to join the play they would be attending this weekend, most likely due to this being their first real opportunity to attend a play together as a couple, rather than as friends, and also his curiosity as to whether the replacement actor would perform as well as the other cast members, as he was a new addition to the troupe. 

_I believe Boroughs has good skill as an actor. It will be enjoyable for us, I am sure._

Due to continued pressure from Doctor Crusher to participate, likely due to the popularity of his performances amongst the crew, Data had reluctantly agreed to take on the role of Petruchio for the next Shakespearean production that would be happening in the following month. Shakespeare was regularly performed in the club, but a full performance was only once a year, an annual tradition which Data had helped instigate. Savil had been helped him practice by becoming ‘Kate’ for him, though her own performance was lackluster. She had never been very good at expressing emotions even falsely, so had never tried to act.

But recently his interest had shifted to being more of a spectator rather than performer, experiencing the emotions that enjoying such a show could bring along with the crowd. She rather enjoyed seeing his reactions as well. How people reacted to a play was almost as important as the play itself.

But today was not a theatre day. Data would not be practicing, so she would not need to play ‘Kate’ today.

 _Perhaps he is playing music right now. Although, he lent his violin to Peters for his role in_ Fiddler on the Roof _. I wonder if Peters has yet to return it? A replicated violin would not perform as well and there are still showings of the play this weekend._

Music was also a pastime she enjoyed, but her choice of instrument, the Vulcan lute, would have meant that performing with an ensemble would limit their choice of pieces to Vulcan string compositions. But again, Data had encouraged her to try adapting non-Vulcan musical pieces to the instrument to see what affect its unique sound would give to the work. She had thus been in a few practices with his quartet, giving them a new and unique sound to experiment with. And they were quickly becoming a quintet in the process.

_Data gives me very good advice, involves me in group events, and is always there for me when I have a need, yet I cannot bring myself to be there for him when he is in serious need. Why am I hesitating to go to him?_

She had been spending so much time with the Commander, it hadn’t occurred to her that they had been doing things that more serious couples did, until they found themselves alone at a table in Ten Forward and he had taken her hand for a moment to recite a poem written solely for her, rather than something he had discovered in a book. She had not been expecting it, but enjoyed it nonetheless. And then he had asked her on the date, making sure to indicate it would be a ‘date’, with a nice dinner afterwards, and not merely going on an outing as two friends.

_I could talk to counselor Troi about this. I need to talk to somebody about this, before I return to Vulcan..._

Dating the Commander was fascinating, engaging and enjoyable...but also troubling.

She had practised the pure Vulcan logic and traditions of her people as long as she had lived. She had never felt the need to separate herself from them before. The human concept of dating had become popular among young Vulcans who were not particularly interested in those they were bonded to as children. A lot of challenges had resulted, the bonding was falling out of fashion everywhere but the homeworld itself.

But she had grown up in a staunchly conservative Vulcan family, her father was a Kolinahr master, and a Professor at the Vulcan Science Institute. Her mother was a High Priestess. She knew that the very notion of dating would cause her father to raise an eyebrow and her mother to ask her the logic in exploring romantic relations with one who was not her betrothed.

But her bond partner had not wanted to continue the relationship after their first coupling and that was the end of that. He had not contacted her since.

Plus, well, the troubling facet of Data was his biology in general. Again, her return to Vulcan. Would he be able to...bond...with a Vulcan? Telepathically? Humans could. Could an emotionally awakened android? After all, if Counselor Deanna Troi could sense Data’s emotions telepathically, then...

That she was considering this possibility alerted her to the sudden seriousness of her interest in him. They had yet to even go on a first date.

“Savil to counsellor Troi,” she said, immediately responding to the seriousness of the thoughts and ideas that had begun forming in her mind. “I need to speak to you if you have a free moment?”

“Of course,” Troi responded immediately. “I’m in my office if you want to join me here.”

“Yes, that would be acceptable.”

She had finally found something to do with her time.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Admiral Nacheyev was no stranger to trouble. She had gotten into quite a few incidents in her youth, and it was these incidents that she chose to believe were responsible for her advancement to the rank of Admiral. She wouldn’t have gotten where she was by sitting down, shutting up and playing it nice.

She was not feeling nice right now as she keyed up Bashir’s record for Captain Picard, to his astonishment, and pushed the PADD towards him across the conference room table. She was sure he believed she would deny him information due to his keeping of information from her. But trust was something she had always felt needed to be earned by others. She trusted Jean-Luc Picard’s abilities as a Captain. He clearly didn’t trust her. But he really did task her at times, and this was one of those weeks where she had been rather tasked by his lack of trust. Or perhaps, his belief that he was able to keep his own counsel on personal issues that could be of serious threat to his own well being, and the well being of others. A classified personnel file was just one way of getting him to understand that she was an important source of support in the chain of command that he needed to learn to depend on emotionally as well as professionally. At least she hoped it was, but not wanting to show her hand she schooled her features into what she hoped was a more neutral expression.

“Well here we are,” Nacheyev watched as Picard scrolled down Bashir’s file and read the most recent mission report intel. “It appears Doctor Bashir was flagged recently for investigation by Starfleet Intelligence, not in relation to his mission to escort the Ambassador. Any reason for concern Admiral?” 

“Starfleet Intelligence likes to mark EVERYTHING related to an investigation as classified,” Nacheyev replied, rolling her eyes. “They must have included everything in his file as possibly suspect, just in case.”

“It does not say why he was flagged. Perhaps his genetically engineered status has raised some concerns?”

“That was my thought too. Doctor Bashir is not under my jurisdiction so I could not tell you what the investigation could be about. But I don’t see how this would still be a problem when his service record is flawless, save for that one lie on his medical record. He also has very high respect with the Bajorans for his work on their world and his commanding officer speaks very highly of him in reports. He’s perfectly placed, in fact, nobody is in a rush to remove him from his duties. Well, except for Doctor Zimmerman, but that is completely off topic. He isn’t on any secret mission related to his escort duties, if that was your concern.”

“I don’t believe Captain Sisko would have let him escort the Ambassador to Parliament if there was anything he was concerned with,” Picard added, putting the PADD down. “Captain Jellico was just making sure all possible avenues were covered before setting out to find them.”

“Certainly not,” Nacheyev took back the PADD. “At any rate, I’ll give privileged access to Jellico too, and remind him that it is in poor taste to have other Captains do his dirty work.”

Picard laughed, which should have cleared the considerable ice between them in _her_ mind. But she knew there was another pressing matter to be concerned with that would put her at risk of causing that icy barrier to reform between them.

“Captain,” she crossed her hands in front of her on the tablet. “This does raise an important point. Doctor Bashir’s secret genetic status would have resulted in his dismissal had Admiral Bennett not realized that losing Doctor Bashir would have serious ramifications on Bajor.”

“Does he have that much influence with Bajor?” Picard said warily, sensing the change in topic was not about Bashir and latching onto the subject of Bajor as a way to keep the conversation in his control. “I knew that Sisko is considered the Emissary of the Prophets, but I wasn’t aware of anything involving Bashir.”

“The Bajoran Kai recently referred to him as _haj a kai,_ the kai’s healer if you translate it literally. Which means she will now only visit him for her annual check-ups, no other doctors.”

“That is a serious position of power. Bajoran religious beliefs and traditions center around the kai as an example of proper Bajoran spiritual behaviour, certainly she is meant to be the religious equivalent of a trendsetter in many respects. No doubt other Bajorans will follow her lead and begin, at the very least, visiting a doctor once a year, as opposed to consulting a traditional Vedic healer.”

Picard was looking rather tense now, no doubt his experience with Bajor had brought up his own unique perspective on the Bajoran faith system. Yet he was indeed still in control of the conversation, not at all pushing her to get to the point, sharing with her a leisurely stroll within the conversation, leisurely so long as he controlled the direction they were strolling in. He was completely composed, and her courage flagged. Time to get to the point, and risk the ice returning once more.

“Nothing is ever what it seems, Captain. Sisko suspects she wants something out of him in return,” Nacheyev pushed her hair away from her face and conceded the high ground. “The point I’m trying to get to here is that if you weren’t the best damn Captain in the fleet you’d be anywhere but where you are. A serious secret kept from your commanding officer, much like the Doctor kept from Captain Sisko and Starfleet medical, greatly undermines my ability to help and protect you.”

" _Protect_ me?”

She detected the offense of the response and hastened to explain.

“Lets just say a lot of people would rather have you at a desk signing orders than in a chair on a starship,” her hair was still not staying in its place, but she would deal with it later. “I would rather have you here, on the Flagship and taking damn charge of this Dominion business in your own way, than have a bunch of young hot heads in command triggering potentially further conflicts. You are sensible, fair, and level headed, and I won’t lose you to damn paranoia and prejudice.”

“And what about my Second Officer? Is it fair for him to take the downfall for my lack of honesty? What of the prejudice against him?”

Straight and to the point. Nacheyev sighed a little, the ice had indeed returned. It would take a lot more to thaw the glaciers that had been forming in their relationship since the day he was assigned under her command. She turned her head to look down the length of the empty conference table. She still needed to set an example, or else Picard’s crew would foment the idea that the Admiral, and all Admirals, were overreacting tyrants. Saduk had commented on having overheard such a comment on board this ship since their arrival. Although she was inclined to believe that Saduk was more of a people pleaser at times, preferring to look good when there was a conflict, rather than making the tough choices and being the unpopular Admiral in the room.

“Admiral?”

She had paused, and kicked herself mentally for woolgathering at this important point in their conversation. She did not want to be seen as a tyrant, but she still needed teeth to be the tiger she believed an Admiral should be, and not a soft fluffy kitten that she was at risk in becoming if she gave him even an inch. She had always had trouble balancing the two. It was time to make a decision.

“Parliament. He can return to his duties when we reach Parliament,”

“That would be tomorrow Admiral, if I increased us to warp nine,” Picard said, amused, knowing warp was restricted in this region in space to five max.

“I may overreact sometimes, but I’m not going to put the _Enterprise_ in a dangerous situation without a proper second officer, however competent your support officers are. I am simply going to say this: no more secrets Captain. A connection like the one you have with Commander Data may seem dangerous to some, or useful to others. I need to know which it is, and which you think it is, so that we can avoid trouble before it happens. And...whether or not it affects you on a more personal and medical level. I’m concerned about your mental health, you do understand that?”

She finally had a point on him, and he was taken aback momentarily, pausing before finally catching himself.

“I don’t think there is anything to be concerned about. The only one of us inconvenienced by the connection so far is Data. I receive nothing from him, his security systems preventing any information from leaving his neural net through the Borg implants, at least not without his command input,” Picard’s voice was stiffer now than it was before, and she knew he hated to be reminded of his connection to the Borg collective. “But Data, I’ve now been told, receives emotions from me. He’s been finding it very useful in learning about humanity and I found it useful to be able to talk to him without having to be in the same room.”

“I see,” Nacheyev noted the look of fascination in his eyes. “If you _are_ finding it really useful, and you aren’t in danger of being assimilated by each other, then by all means, use it to your full advantage.”

“Then you don’t want us to block the connection Admiral?”

Her bluntness once again took him by surprise, and she was finally feeling that she was on the right footing.

“Not if you don’t want to, and I won’t force you to consider it unless it becomes a risk. We need every weapon available to us for dealing with the Dominion,” she stated as fact. “I just spent a week before coming on board dealing with a recent theft of some very dangerous equipment from Daystrom Institute. Experimental, most of it. And the thieves could have been Dominion. We gain an inch and they take a mile.”

“Wasn’t there a theft at a Daystrom facility two months ago?” Picard said suddenly, sitting up fully.

“Yes, it seems our research stations have a revolving door when it comes to secret technology. I only hope that we won’t be seeing these things in the hands of the Dominion any time soon.”

“Riker to Captain Picard!” came the sudden interruption of their conversation.

“Picard here,” he didn’t mention Nacheyev’s presence which she was grateful for.

“We’re getting an urgent message from the _Cairo_...They’ve found the shuttle’s trail. It was headed straight for the Rubicun system a few days ago and the trail ends there.”

“Is that the trouble I think it is?” Picard said, looking suddenly quite serious.

“Dominion ships have been spotted heading to and from Rubicun III, the pacifist Edo homeworld. The _Cairo_ is going to intercept,” Riker responded. “The _Farragut_ has also been alerted and is en route now.”

“Change course to join them, warp five.” he cut the signal and turned to look at her. “Well Admiral, Data may have to wait two weeks to return to duty after all.”

Nacheyev watched him get up to head straight for the bridge, but she stayed for a moment to pull her hair out and put it back into its neat little bun. She wanted to be presentable, even for battle. Lord knows she wasn’t in any mood for anymore trouble, even if she was prepared for it nonetheless.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Captain Edward Jellico of the Federation Starship _Cairo_ knew that he was not an overtly popular guy. In fact his straight laced attitude of ‘Get it done’ rubbed a lot of people the wrong way in most situations, and he had been nicknamed ‘Hellico’ by some of the nicer people, and much worse by others. In terms of his crew, however, it had just been a matter of finding the right sort of people who worked well with him, and adapted well to his way of thinking. For most of his command his crew had followed him loyally the way the _Enterprise_ crew stuck like glue to Captain Picard. But Picard was a Diplomat _par excellence_.

Jellico was a soldier. He’d dealt with Cardassians, and Talarians, and Tholians, and he had been on rough borders for a very long time. His crew was therefore the exact kind of crew needed for a conflict with the Dominion; ready for battle, very well rested on a four-shift rotation, firmly attuned to the needs of the captain and non-experimental with the ship systems, keeping everything running as close to battle ready as possible. But he often lost crew, not because of mistakes, but because of the natural losses that happened in battle situations. Calculating losses was a part of a border Captain’s duties before accepting an assignment.

And he’d seen battlefields aplenty. Bodies torn apart by landmines into unidentifiable bits of bloody debris and splintered bone. Lumps of something that could have been a person had it not been exposed to disfiguring liquids and gases. He had seen men who had been stripped of all humanity, tortured as prisoners by their enemies, fighting tooth and nail against waves of mericless foes and reduced to bare instincts, hair triggered and suicidal men, shell shocked men, and women; battle trauma was a genderless beast. He once had been inches from being murdered in cold blood by his own Commander, Nathanial Searls, God rest his soul wherever he was, who was under the telepathic control of a Lethian spy.

But nothing could have prepared him for Doctor Julian Subatoi Bashir when he found the man; sitting in the middle of a burned out Edo village, perched like a bird amongst the dozens of Jem’Hadar bodies, and various parts of them, with a Dominion disruptor hanging over his shoulder and a long sharp curved and bloodstained harvesting scythe in the other hand. Piles of discharged energy canisters lay beside him on the ground. His eyes were staring off somewhere ahead of him, as if looking towards the next wave of Jem’Hadar soldiers and already calculating his next attack.

Jellico felt the strange sensation of a frightened prey animal looking upon a predator, and Bashir was the prehistoric beast, a raptor with sharp teeth and claws, surveying his bounty of prey in anticipation of the next hunt...the next kill.

Jellico perhaps?

“Doctor Bashir. Doctor Julian Bashir,” he approached cautiously. “My name is Captain Edward Jellico of the Starship _Cairo_. We’ve been searching for you son.”

Jellico knew a man who had seen too much death. He might not have been popular off the battlefield, but on the battlefield he was equal to none when it came to dealing with soldiers. Nearly a week of searching for this man, and Nacheyev’s release of his personnel file, had hopefully prepared him for the risk that he would be taking by approaching him face to face. This was a genetically engineered man in fighter mode, surrounded by the no-longer-living-or-breathing proof of his advanced skill set, and who could rip him to shreds he was sure of it. But Jellico’s own confidence and skill was what would be of most importance here, because having confidence when approaching a shell shocked soldier was key. It was absolutely vital that Bashir see him as the superior and a friend, not as a barrier to be thwarted.

“Doctor, Doctor Bashir,” Jellico repeated. “Report. What is your status Doctor?”

“Status...safe,” the face was calm and distant, but the voice was ragged, dry from lack of water. “Captain. Thirsty. Dehydrated...”

_Thank god!_

Jellico used this as his lifeline and had his people beam down a potable water canteen for him to offer to Bashir. The man dropped the scythe onto the ground to accept the canteen and drank down the entire thing. Jellico felt relief fill his own chest as the man began to shake, shoulders were quaking, limbs quivering, exhaustion was catching up and hopefully reality would set back in soon. The farther away from reality he was, the harder it would be to handle him.

“Good to see you’re safe Doctor,” Jellico said, offering his shoulder in support to the exhausted man to lean upon, whilst quietly motioning for his second officer to join them. “What happened to Ambassador Els?”

Bashir seemed to remember himself, and stood up, and Jellico suddenly realized that Bashir had been standing on a metal hatch. The hatch was quickly opened and his second officer went down with a team to see where it went. 

It lead to an emergency shelter of some kind, and soon down there at the bottom of the metal ladder was Ambassador Els and dozens of frightened Edo, who greeted the rescuers with questioning eyes and relieved crying. They had been down there in the emergency shelter for four days, filthy from mud and marked with strange sickly lesions that looked like radiation burns. Ambassador Els seemed quite healthy and fine in contrast, if not angry and put out by all the fuss the away team was making over her condition. Jellico had found that Bajorans were a hearty people and had stamina in spades.

Doctor Bashir began to cough violently, which brought him back to the present, and he left his second in charge of everything to locate a quiet spot for Bashir to sit down again and take another big swallow of the water. His shoulders were still heaving, this time not from exhaustion, but from the rolling tears pouring down his face.

“S’posed to be diff’rent,” Bashir said, his voice slurred from his fatigue. “S’posed to be th’ ‘ception not th’ rule. But I’m still v’lent, ‘rnt I?”

Jellico started to untangle his brain from all his past experiences with battlefield trauma to confront the stark reality of just what exactly this man, this Doctor, meant.

“You seem peaceful enough to me right now sonny,” Jellico said. “You weren’t slaughtering unarmed Edo or Starfleet officers, were you? You were fighting for their lives! That is a difference. Own that. You protected them all. You did good here today.”

“Didn’t find the cure,” said the man, scratching at his hand, where Jellico noted a port wine stain mark that seemed out of place somehow. “Still sick aren’t they?”

“The Edo?” Jellico suddenly understood what the purple mark and the lesions on the Edo must have meant. “They aren’t suffering from radiation then. A disease?”

Bashir’s eyes were wet from tears, but he pulled the tricorder out of his belt to check its logs. The Starfleet Doctor he had once been was thankfully still there, coming quickly back to his senses, and that was a good sign. 

“Virus, its definitely something engineered specifically for the Edo,” his British accent was starting to enforce itself back as sanity was returning to his mind.“I’d need a team to figure out what kind…and if it can be cured.”

“You’ll have it son,” Jellico decided, knowing that trust and giving him back the duties he preferred would go a long way towards his recovery, then stood up to motion to call out to his second. “Carl, tell the _Cairo_ we’re quarantining this planet and the landing parties until there’s some solution or cure for this disease the Doctor found. Medical officers already on the ground are under Doctor Bashir’s command until we can get more medical support of the sort meant to deal with this sort of thing. And make sure we contact the _Enterprise_ and the _Farragut_ to let them know we found the shuttle and her passengers safe, if not sound.”

A plethora of activity followed as supplies were sent down, emergency tents and shelters constructed, food and water handed out to the Edo, and his medical team under Bashir’s direction set up tables to start identifying the virus and formulating a cure.

If they could.

_Bashir may be a broken man right now, but he is the very best, he’s Starfleet, and if he’s not able to find a cure then we may be stuck here for a very long time…if not dead in a fortnight._

Battlefields were something he could handle. But the field of landmines that Doctors navigated in a laboratory every day were those he would best leave to the experts to get done this time.

And it would get done. He was sure of it.


	4. A Mother And Her Children

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had to rewrite this chapter twice. I always lapse into ‘tell’ mode when writing when ‘show’ is so much better to read. If I write a whole chapter without a single quotation mark, or if I use the word ‘had’, I go back and ask myself whether I’m showing or telling.
> 
> I may make a lot of mistakes when I write. But I always read through my chapters three times before posting, so I'm sorry if any grammar slips through, I do as best as I can. Thank you for all the kudos and commenting, I am happy that people like my story! :D

_Blee-dee-beep!_

Deja vu filled Data’s brain as he looked up from his feverish work at the empty canvas before him to check his inner chronometer. He wasn’t expecting anyone, but he had told counselor Troi he would talk to his friends and he wasn’t going to ignore another chime on his door.

“Enter.”

The door swooshed open and to both his horror and delight the long lovely form of Lieutenant Savil slipped almost shyly into his quarters. She surveyed the room briefly before finding him in the corner by his easel.

“Commander Data, I hope I’m not disturbing you. I went to see counselor Troi and she said you were wanting company.”

_I owe Counselor Troi a dish of chocolate ice cream for this one._

“Of course you are welcome, please come in,” Data noted her use of his formal title with caution. He put the brush he was holding into the jar of water on the table next to his stool and motioned her over. “I would love your critical assessment of my work. I was trying to re-create the painting I had been working on a few days ago that...was destroyed. But I created this in its place, which differs considerably from the previous work in medium used and the intent in the painting.”

She didn’t comment on the destruction of the old piece, but approached the canvas in curiosity to examine it, moving leisurely with both hands behind her back as she, well he could only describe this movement as a ‘slow saunter’.

“Fire,” she commented, her eyes strayed to the table with his paints on it and she raised one hand to delicately touch the tubes and trail along the curve of the water glass. “Your use of non-standard media helps create shape in the flames. Fascinating.”

Ten Foward seemed miles away from his quarters now, so very far away and so long ago, and there were no crew members watching them here. She inched a little closer to him as she moved closer to the canvas, examining the lines of the flames as he examined her eyelashes. Data relished in the complement implied by the standard Vulcan comment she had used. She was rather fascinating to him as well. Her increasing closeness was stirring something in his internal systems, though he wasn’t sure what to make of the increase of stimulus responses in his neural net, and he picked out another brush to blend the gesso and watercolors into a brown-red paste, thus briefly distracting himself.

“I’ve been finding joy in experimenting with the medium, rather than sticking to one type. It is a great way to exercise my creativity.”

These were the right words to say, her large brown eyes turned to look at him appreciatively. If Vulcans smiled she would be. It was easy to tell when a Vulcan was pleased; the almost-but-not-smiling purse of her lips, the slight rise of the nose and chin, the appreciative look in her eyes and the relaxed posture of her shoulders. 

“So what caused you to choose this particular subject matter for experimenting with mixed media?”

Her voice had become slightly breathy. Data smiled. Her very formal way of trying to keep a conversation neutral was moot in light of her question immediately hitting the arrow mark of his emotions regarding her.

“My dream program has been introducing the element of heat and the feeling of it, sometimes in bad ways,” he winced at the reminder of the fever nightmares. “Sometimes in good ways.”

“And the new medium better helps you express what you are experiencing in your sleep,” She avoided asking about the bad dreams, to which he was grateful. “It creates three dimentional realism that draws your eyes inward to the brightest part of the flame.”

Savil’s three-dimensional nature was drawing his eyes upward along her curved body, but he stopped and remained at her eyes, sparkling with something he could not place, could not describe in words, and she looked deeply back into his.

“And in painting this way I can hopefully recreate the feeling of heat,” he hadn’t realized that he had risen from his stool in response to her closeness, but she was not giving off any physical cues to indicate that she needed more space. Or that it was the painting she was wanting to be closer to.

“And what is the nature of this heat that you would wish to feel it outside of your dreams? Another human experience perhaps?”

His hands had found their way to her shoulders without him consciously choosing them to. Her eyelashes were fluttering closed in instinct.

“Passion….” he whispered, leaning into her. Her lips were mere inches from his...

“Passion…?” her response was whispered against his lips as he crossed the last barrier of space between.

Nothing else was spoken.

\----------

Captain Jean-Luc Picard was filled with extreme gratitude as he prepared to beam down to the planet’s surface with his away team. He was grateful to Admiral Nacheyev for keeping Riker’s objections to his going firmly under her thumb, for Captain Jellico, already on the planet, who had dispatched the Jem’Hadar ships before the _Enterprise_ had ever arrived, and was personally dealing with the casualties and relief efforts of the surviving Edo. He was grateful to the _Farragut_ for taking over patrolling the outer solar system to pick out any remaining Dominion ships that might approach.

And he was eternally grateful as well to Doctor Bashir, courageous, rebellious Doctor Bashir, who had injected himself at some point in time with the Edo virus in order to create the antibodies they would need to inoculate at the very least their human crew, so that by the time Jellico had found him the vaccine was pretty much just sitting around inside Bashir’s veins waiting for them to use it. A dangerous and potentially quite messy way to create a vaccine, according to Doctor Crusher, but his advanced immune system had been fully up to the task. And the antibodies could, indeed, be used to vaccinate any blood type. Bashir’s genetically engineered blood was apparently the rare regenerative R2B- type, called B- for the blood type it was mistaken for in medical scanners, when it had virtually no barriers to being compatible to any host.

But now Doctor Crusher, Bashir himself and the _Cairo_ ’s CMO Nicolas Gordan, were all in conflict; the Edo had rejected their offer of the vaccine, accepting that the virus was a punishment from their God. Releasing the cure to them in secret would violate the Prime Directive, according to Gordon. But Bashir and Crusher both insisted that the virus was Dominion in origin, Bashir was in fact an expert in their methods of genetic engineering, and allowing the Edo to remain deceived at the cost of their life was a cruel use of the Prime Directive. The virus was fatal to the Edo up to ten days after contracting it, which would obliterate the entire race as it spread across the planet. Case in point, the _Cairo_ party had been burying Edo since landing. There wasn’t much time left to save their entire species from potential extinction.

Therefore Nacheyev and Saduk had decided that the only way to convince the Edo that the vaccine was what the Edo God wanted for them…was by having the Edo talk to their God themselves.

So this mission really was Picard’s mission, being a diplomat and an archaeologist fascinated with alien relics and technologies, who else should lead the away team to study the fallen Edo God? Riker would have to accept that this was completely in Picard’s ballpark. 

Next to him in the transporter room, thankfully free of any infection, the Edo leader Rivan stood pensive with her two chosen aides, both still shell shocked to have been able to see for themselves the stars beyond the ship’s viewports. Rivan had gladly accepted his offer to go see the crashed space station and learn its mysteries, an olive branch considering their last meeting with her. She was the spiritual leader of all the Edo people, who listened to her decisions first with regards to interpreting the will of God, because she had ‘been in the Sky with God’. A high place to be indeed.

But the thing Picard was most grateful for now as his team assembled to beam down with them was Admiral Saduk’s insistence to Nacheyev that Commander Data go with them. Who would have seen that coming? Saduk argued that Data’s skills would be absolutely vital to learning more about the alien space station and how it functioned. It was really one of his specialties; as an Operations officer dealing with the operations of starships and space stations in general, was his primary _job_.

Add to this Lieutenant Savil’s exobiology specialization, in the oft chance they did find alien life inside the downed station, and three engineers lead by Commander Georgi LaForge to fully round out their group, and Picard felt a severe level of confidence in their mission and the team’s ability to handle whatever came from it.

Picard noted that Commander Data was smiling rather broadly as he stepped up onto the transporter pad with Lieutenant Savil, and conferring quietly with her about their tricorder settings. Picard felt that Data’s smile had to have been contagious because Lieutenant Barclay nearby was smiling just as widely watching them. Picard started to smile himself; this was, technically, the first mission the new couple was taking together, and he could almost feel the intimacy floating between them.

Or maybe he was. It had been a while though, since he had tried to contact Data through their link. He was respecting the man’s privacy but he was itching to know how he was feeling, the temptation was almost worse than the not knowing itself.

As for the Edo God, when the transporter signal had finally given way to the sight of metal and the feeling of heat, everyone’s smiles fell flat and Picard exhaled his breath in a whoosh.

“Merde,” thank god curses didn’t translate by default, his wasn’t the only one.

“What a mess,” said Ensign Stark, the other engineer with LaForge and Barclay.

Rivan let out a little sad sound next to him as she looked up upon her God, the two Edo aides she had brought with her immediately bending their heads in respect. Tears began to fall almost immediately.

“Are you still alright with this?” Picard asked her softly, putting a hand out to her shoulder in comfort.

“We must learn more,” she said, steeling herself and tightening her grip on the less advanced Edo recording device she had brought with her. “We must learn what God would have wanted us to do, remain and live, or go with him into death…”

Picard nodded, fully respectful. They had met her at the center of the Edo capital when he beamed there from the shuttlecraft crash site to confer with the Edo leaders. The little village Bashir had crashed near had a very small populace and the virus had yet to spread to the entire planet, and most thankfully not to the capitol, and he had made sure every member of the party was fully inoculated and not a carrier before letting them go near any unaffected Edo. Picard hoped the Edo would be able to stay in quarantine in their separated towns long enough for the virus to die out completely, but knowing they were a loving people, who survived on cooperative trade of food and materials between communities, he could only hope so much. It was up to their team to find a reason for them to accept Starfleet’s help. He was determined to do so. 

“Well let us start with finding an entrance,” Data suggested, as they strode along the blackened earth and rocks. “The high levels of heat from this end of the station indicates that this end is the power source.”

“Good idea, Data, maybe this way?” LaForge, Data and the Engineering team spread out along the length of the station looking for a hatch and the rest of them moved down along the hulk to the other end, where there were still lights active at the top. Even on the ground it was powered.

“I’m not detecting life signs,” LaForge reported over his combadge.

“No signs of the virus or other organic contaminants,” Savil added, 

“Commander, over here!” Ensign Stark suddenly called out to LaForge, and the team swarmed to where they had finally located a hatch, which had a single glowing symbol carved in its center.

Barclay put hesitant fingers to the symbol, which caused the door to whoosh open to the side, the door designed to draw upwards when in an upright position.

“The people who built this station must have been very tall,” the man commented, and Picard noted delightedly that there was not one stutter from this usually very nervous man.

But now they were confronted by the second problem endemic to investigating crash sites; a sideways door. Each member of the party bent their heads down as they ducked into the hatch, which was longer and taller than a standard human door, and much skinnier. The metal walls of the station’s internal structure was a teal chrome color, engraved in thousands of strange glowing orange-red runes and symbols that lit up to the touch.

“Curious markings,” Data said as they walked slowly along, touching the runes, and noting the change of colors at his touch. “The symbols on the walls form a runic alphabet of sorts, but they may also serve a less decorative function. There appears no other computer consoles or interface.”

The hallways were also cramped, they had to navigate the hallways sideways, crouching to keep their heads from banging on the walls. The scanning of tricorders and the slower, slightly crunchy noise from the Edo devices was keeping them from being encased in pure silence but the claustrophobia was not being helped by it.

“Captain,” Savil said suddenly, sounding incredulous. “I’m detecting a lifesign nearby…”

Everyone stopped. Rivan made a sound like a dove startled, mouth forming a perfect ‘o’ shape, and Picard made sure the Edo group were ahead of the Engineers, sandwiched between him, Savil, Data and the security team as they continued. The hatchway Data approached lead into a very large central room, rounded tall walls with more runes glowing and flashing, and light holographic screens flickering and projecting on and off around a prone form on a floating oval shaped bed in the center of the room.

“She’s dying, I’m afraid,” said Savil, who was leveraging the angle of the walls to stabilize herself to an upright position as she scanned the occupant in the bed. “Internal bleeding, severe trauma...less than an hour at best.”

Picard only just realized the Edo were on their knees, praying. Picard went closer to the alien, passing Savil and crawling up the tilted floor. He felt his stomach come up into his chest as he finally reached a height that allowed him to look over the edge of the floating bed at the lone occupant. He could not help but stare.

She was very thin, and frail, gray skinned with a thin skull and narrow eyes, and a mouth like the end of a spoon, her little tongue sticking out and clear liquid rolling down onto her neat clean white clothing. She was definitely unrelated to the Edo, with spindly long fingers and toes, and no hair to mention on her body. But her pale body was only half in this universe, and half out of it, phazing in opacity, barely able to remain here, but trying to stay nonetheless. Her fingers were touching the holograms at her sides, and they reacted and stabilized the motion of her floating bed, bringing the bed down closer towards the floor, which caused her body to solidify a little more. This technology was more advanced than anything Picard had ever thought possible, she was not hovering due to hoverpads or thrusters or tractor beams, or anything of that sort, she was simply floating midair and defying gravity. His own tricorder indicated no power source nor internal mechanisms...the bed was just a bed. She turned to look at him, suddenly aware she was no longer alone.

“My name is Jean-Luc...”

“...Picard...Captain of the _Enterprise_ ,” she finished for him. She spoke haltingly in a heavy accent, like a flowing folk song heard faintly from some distant green hills. His translator had to have been inadequate to the task of translating her language because she was pointedly using his own. And she _knew_ his language. “My name cannot be spoken in your people’s tongue. Please tell her not to fear, but to come near me…I have much to say...and little time...”

He had heard this before, from the Traveller many years ago, though he had been different in species, the effect of her body was the same, he could see that parts of her were no longer able to remain solid no matter how stable the bed remained. Was she also a Traveller?

“Quickly," she insisted. “Too little time left...too little time…”

Picard nodded, berated himself mentally for staring at her for so long and went over to Rivan, who was crying and shaking her head back and forth. The other two Edo had their faces planted on the floor.

“She wishes to speak with you. Will you speak with her?”

“I cannot, I cannot, we are to blame, we should have come sooner…”

“No, no, there wasn’t anything your people could do, and this is why you are here now, to learn from her. She wants you to come speak with her.”

The away party was waiting, respectfully, for this scene to draw itself out before doing their work, watching with sadness as Picard knelt down and put his hand on Rivan’s shoulder again.

Rivan just cried. But after a long while, too long for his comfort, the frightened rejection of the unknown and uncertainty left her gaze and he saw curiosity fill her eyes.

“Yes, I will,” she said, the wild moment of bravery brought her up to her feet, but uncertain what to do next she just stumbled towards the bed.

He had to help her up, the floor was heavily tilted and the floating bed was not something which they could hold onto for support. But soon Rivan stood, well more or less was leaning on the floor next to her God. 

“You must have so many questions for me, but I do not have the time to answer them all…” said the alien gently.

“We could not protect you,” Rivan said, looking sad.

“It was my duty to protect _you_ ,” the alien responded in amusement. “My poor child, you are still too young to have to deal with the universe beyond your world, and now you must. I failed to prepare you for this. I am so sorry.”

Rivan was stunned by this admission, and Picard could well feel what she must have been feeling. Hearing God apologizing to _you_ would have been severely unnerving to anyone.

“What must we do without you? How do we live?”

“How?” she looked around her, at the away party, then at her hologram screens, and then she smiled. “You simply must live each day one at a time. And you must learn about all that you see around you. And choose which path you want to take from the many that are there before you. They can help you find a path,” she indicated the others in the room with a finger. “One day, you will be children no more, you will be grown, and walk amongst the stars just as they do,” her eyes found Picard and there was warning in them. “But you let my Children grow and learn as they are able, they must grow without pressure, without needs beyond their means or understanding. Kindness above all else must guide them.”

“I understand,” Picard said, feeling the weight of this responsibility suddenly filling him like a hot lead.

“Oh do you?” she retorted. “How can children lead children? You still have much to learn as well, young man.”

A delighted smile formed on his face at this, indeed Starfleet with their uniforms and starships must have seen very simple to her. How he longed to spend days and days in conversation with this curious woman.

“I too yearn to stay, but now my time is over in this universe. Please care for each other, the universe is full of such beauty for both of your peoples to discover, how much more fulfilling and beautiful to discover it together,” she reached out a hand to each of them and Rivan gasped as a solid finger touched her cheek to wipe away a tear. “Do not cry, there is so much laughter hiding within you.”

Picard felt the cool yet living touch on his own cheek, but it was too brief, too brief, before the hand left him to tap a hologram beside the bed, and with one last smile the alien phased out of their universe completely the bed lowering to the floor and coming to rest at last.

Rivan and the other Edo wept and cried despite her commandment to laugh, and Picard carefully navigated back down to Data’s side to look to him for guidance.

“Well, any thoughts?” he asked the android, needing his matter-of-fact manner and stability to focus him from the surreal scene he had just been a part of.

“Highly advanced, and empathic, for certain,” Data said, “Savil indicated as such before she, well,” he pointed and Picard noted Savil next to him on the floor, legs crossed, meditative and statue-like. 

“Are you alright Lieutenant Savil?” Picard asked, feeling that the point was moot. Clearly she had been affected in some way.

She didn’t respond as immediately as he would have liked, and looked up at him, almost startled at hearing voices so close to her. What had the alien conveyed to her without speaking?

“I am,” she said, and Data bent down to support her from behind and help her rise. Picard heard her whisper something that he missed, and he felt momentarily jealous of their trusting looks to each other.

“Unofficially, I would equate what I have seen here as a mother bird, pushing her young chick from the nest in order for them to learn how to fly,” Data concluded, turning back to face him. “Sir if you do not need us, we’ll go explore the other rooms in the station.”

“I understand,” Picard said. “I think I need to go get some air myself.”

But the metaphor of a mother bird was as beautiful and sad as this whole business was, and he planned to quote Data in his report regardless of its unofficial nature, a gift perhaps to admiral Nacheyev for letting the other man be here to witness.

Once the Edo had composed themselves Picard returned to help guide them back outside. A small nod to LaForge once he had reached the door out and his Chief Engineer knew that it was safe to begin scanning and studying and taking apart panels and getting to the nitty gritty of learning all about this strange alien structure. It would be a thoroughly respectful inventory of its mysteries by those who knew what to do with what they learned.

Picard would make sure they would share with the Edo everything they learned as well. Curiosity and the thirst for knowledge had awakened in Rivan’s eyes, he had seen it, and the Edo people would soon be hungry with the need to discover all that was unknown to them before.

But adolescence was never easy for any child. He hoped that the Federation could provide the guided hand the Edo God had wanted for them. She had given rather subtle clues in her few spoken words, but there had been such power in those words that he was sure he himself was indeed inadequate in some way, it would take more diplomacy, patience and _kindness_ than a single Starfleet away team could provide, that was for certain.

No wonder the Edo were so humble and self effacing under the influence of such a Mother. He hoped her children would be able to fully embrace their new independence without any fuss. There was never any going back, once innocence was lost.

His second officer, in his newly budding romance, was a testament to that.

\------

“To BED Doctor!” Doctor Beverly Crusher’s stern voice suddenly broke through the fog that had been forming in his brain, waking him as if he had been in a trance. “You are human! You need sleep!”

Julian Bashir looked up from his chair, where he had been making up hypo sprays of vaccine. Hundreds of Edo had converged upon him after their leader had returned from her investigation of the Edo God space station. She had been with the team as they searched the crash site, had found her God there, spoken to her God, and had then returned to her people and declared that God had commanded them to live, and by God’s commandment that they would accept the vaccine as a gift from their new friends and allies, the United Federation of Planets. And that is when all the Edo, from the capitol to start with, had begun to arrive by their own light rail system here to the quarantine station in hopes of getting the vaccine for themselves. Many were also going to the crash site to worship and pray for the team members still doing work there. It was just so bizarre.

“In a minute, Doctor Crusher, I’ve…”

“No, not in a minute Doctor Bashir, _now_ ,” she declared, firmly, in a voice that reminded him of his mother on one particularly rainy day when he had trampled across the kitchen in muddy boots, bringing her to sudden temper. “Have you eaten? Ogawa, get him some of that soup that the _Cairo_ sent down. Honestly, some Doctors just never take care of themselves, I just don’t understand it...”

Bashir would have argued the point with her, but she was probably right. He hadn’t eaten since Rivan had first come up to his table to bare her arm proudly for the vaccine, which had set him off his guard immediately. The Edo, when they chose a path, stayed on that path, and Rivan’s people had followed her in a line like ants on a branch. He had spent the entire day vaccinating healthy Edo and away team members coming and going to the planet.

A bowl of plomeek soup was placed in front of him and he smiled. Vulcan food was amazingly diverse and flavorful, the flavor of which was enhanced with spices and herbs, fruits, nuts and seeds. But plomeek was something he always ate. It was one of his favorites. Though he wondered why the _Cairo_ was sending down plomeek soup as opposed to rations that were more standard.

Crusher also handed him a ration pack, the starchy salty cracker would be a needed addition to the soup, and round out the meal, even if it wasn’t the tastiest object in the standard issue survival pack. Even his tricorder would probably beat out ration crackers in the realm of taste.

“Thank you,” he said to her, gratefully.

“You’re welcome. If you fall apart, how are we going to create more vaccines?” she was teasing him. “We’ll get a replicated version figured out soon, and the quarantine will soon be set up between the Edo groups that have been arriving, so don’t push yourself more than necessary.”

Bashir was reminded of the millions of Edo still vulnerable and groaned, bending his head and staring at the soup. The infected could not be cured, but the vaccine would hopefully prevent anymore from getting sick, if they could get to the healthy ones before the sick ones did. Time and the quarantine would have to do their job. He was out of energy. 

For a moment as he was eating, his eyes caught on the wine red mark that had formed on his arm, and caught himself smiling a little. No less than every Edo he vaccinated had looked at the red mark on his arm, the side effect of his injecting himself with the virus to create antibodies, and commented on its shape. Perhaps because it was taking the form of what might have been mistaken for a local bird of some sort, something the Edo called the ‘Casswa’, with two fluffy wings and a long trailing tail that curled around the mark in a swirl. But one elderly Edo had asked to touch his arm, asked what had caused it, (his testing the virus on himself to create a vaccine, had been his strict Prime Directive based response) and then the smiling man had called him God touched, and his stomach had flipped in dismay.

_I do not want to be a part of any religion, it is annoying enough that Kai Winn is dragging me into hers._

It was for that reason that Els Renora had chosen him as her escort doctor, since Kai Winn had named him ‘haj a kai.’ The atheist in him hated it completely and wanted to reject it completely. The strategist in him was highly motivated to take advantage of it to influence the Ambassador, and the doctor in him refused to give in to the temptation. Nonetheless, after asking for Sisko’s carefully considered advice, and receiving feedback from both Kira and Dax, he had accepted the title. But he knew Kai Winn wanted something from him in exchange for the mostly religious based privilege and influence she had granted to him, and it wouldn’t be much longer before he discovered what.

“Doctor, you are practically falling asleep in your soup.”

Julian swore and broke off a piece of the ration cracker to toss into the soup. He wanted it nice and mushy before he ate it, and maybe the taste of the cracker would by improved by the soup.

“I need more than just soup and sleep,” he said between reluctant bites. “I need a vacation. This escort duty was more stressful than I expected it would be, a lot more.”

A sympathetic hand was placed on his shoulder, Nurse Ogawa, and he was stunned when she put a chocolate bar next to his bowl.

“Those candy bars you invented in our chemistry class have been a regular part of my personal medical kit,” she revealed. Bashir had forgotten that Ogawa had been in his chemistry class that year, she had graduated before him because he had gone on to major in pediatrics and she had gone straight to the _Enterprise_ with her nursing certificate.

“You remembered,” he said, looking stunned.

“She won’t let us forget,” Crusher stated, pouring a tea from her thermos into a cup. “She has been promoting your candy bar as a proper replacement for the ration packs for years. Starfleet has mostly ignored her.”

“Oh certainly,” Bashir broke off a piece to offer to Crusher, but she declined. “Why would they want to give Starfleet officers something that tastes good in their survival kit?”

“Nothing to stop us from stocking it for ourselves,” Ogawa said impishly. 

“Nothing at all,” The sweet sticky substance was a potent balm to settle his violently churning thoughts, and was helping him focus on what he was going to do about the mark on his arm.

It all depended upon his R2B- blood, whether or not it would repair those blood vessels after all the virus samples he had been injecting himself with, and all the antibodies he had been drawing out of his blood afterwards. Regenerative blood types in general were rare due to their negative association with the Eugenics wars, and little scientific study had been done on the subject, so there was no way to know how his blood would behave. He really hoped it would cure the mark, but he had already calculated the possibility was really low. He still had a scar on his shoulder where he had once been severely burned, and since it was under his uniform had never bothered getting cosmetic treatment for it. He had gotten the burn that one time on DS9 when he had been acting as a guide to those visiting Ambassadors and they were trapped in a fire. He had been burned heavily before finding a safe space for them to escape into, but he hadn’t treated himself for the burns until much later and his body had already healed most of the damaged skin underneath the surface scab. He _had not_ indicated the true severity of his injuries in the incident report he sent to Sisko in order to cover up the fact that he had basically healed from deadly burns in less than two hours. 

_And later, when they found out about my augmentation..._

Starfleet Medical, Admiral Bennet and Captain Sisko had ordered him to sit down and go over every single report he had ever made to Starfleet, from academy to present day, and indicate in a footnote where he had lied to protect his status from being discovered. It had been _humiliating_ to discover how much he had lied to protect himself. He had been guilt ridden and antisocial for days afterwards, until Sisko had gotten his reports and came to his quarters to bring him around with a rousing pep talk. Sisko could get a brick wall to move if he had a mind to.

But Bashir was not sure if the mark would disappear once the antibodies were no longer needed for making the vaccine. 

_And it shouldn’t. I shouldn’t get rid of it. I’m stained. The Mark of Cain. Nobody will ever be fooled as to what I am now...never again…._

Certainly the _Cairo_ ’s doctor had not let him forget. Bashir had been avoiding Doctor Nicolas Gordon with all of his might when he could, for the elderly man clearly did not like him at all, even more so because Bashir was the de facto leader of the medical team on-planet, under Jellico’s first command day one, and none of the other commanding officers on the other ships had chosen to countermand that. Bashir wasn’t sure how he was going to handle this man’s clear dislike of him and handle all the Edo that would be waiting all night for him to emerge with the vaccine, but it didn’t matter now, for he now was in the cot Crusher had prepared for him, the soup was done, the candy was gone, and he was laying on the bed, eyes heavy...breath coming out in even steady rhythms, the mental fog from before returning at once...As he fell into his sleep his dreams drifted from purple birds and chocolate bars and diving into a nice warm bowl of plomeek soup with many beautiful naked Edo surrounding him.

He hoped he would wake up the next morning to Crusher’s beaming news that she had found a replication method. If this was how tired he was after just half a day, he couldn’t imagine inoculating 200 million people.


	5. Too Many Cooks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ~ You may have noticed that I'm a bit of a bird brain. Birds are my favourite animal, so expect a lot of bird references in this series, this story is basically just a love song to birds :3
> 
> Also, science nerds who want to correct my writing please do. I know nothing about science and medicine, I throw terms out there the same way I use any other Star Trek technobabble, I use it for aesthetics. I could use an expert’s help with my story if there are any who are willing to lend their brains to me. :3
> 
> Finally, I have switched to using Julian Bashir’s first name in chapter sections that are written from his viewpoint. This is a test of whether I want to write the whole series this way, since he and Data are the main characters in my story and referring to him as Bashir all the time seems rather impersonal, when Data is always Data and that is his only name. It's always hard to know whether to use a characters surname or given name, but for my main characters I tend to prefer using their first names if they are going to be the focus of much of the action. The exception will probably be Picard since Jean-Luc didn’t really feel right when I tried to use it that way. Let me know what you think I should do! :D I’m always open to suggestions!

Morning. The cold of autumn was starting to set in now. It was barely 6 am, but he felt chipper as he crunched alone through the frosted grass into the medical research tent in hopes of finding breakfast.

“Good morning!” said Julian Bashir as he bounded into the room. “Any progress while I’ve been out like a light?”

“We formulated a replicable version of the vaccine Doctor,” Doctor Crusher stated when he came into the research tent that morning, not even looking up from her work. “But the virus has mutated, we may have to…formulate...a...new...” 

She had looked up, and her voice had drifted off, and he frowned and nodded in resignation, scratching his cheek absently. Nurse Ogawa, who had also been busy, turned around at her strange silence and gave a cry. Doctor Gordon leapt to his feet from his station.

“Doctor!!” he said in alarm, and immediately pulled out a tricorder to scan him.

Julian stuck his hands in his pockets to keep from scratching anymore as Gordon analyzed his port wine stain, which had grown up his left arm and was now covering over his shoulder and neck, trailing one accusatory red finger around his eye brow down his nose.

“The antibody factory in your blood has grown in size and density while you slept,” Gordon assessed correctly. “This is not what should have happened.”

“No kidding,” Julian said, and hastily grabbed some coffee from the table near the door. Thank God Captain Jellico was in charge of putting together the ration supplies for them. He had actually sent real coffee, ground beans and not-replicated, just for the doctors. “Since the virus is mutating, I’m guessing the virus I introduced into my bloodstream to create antibodies must also be mutating, and my immune system must be increasing the amount of antibodies its producing as a result. We can use them to create new vaccines for the mutations.”

“Which would make our replicable version now moot,” Crusher moaned. “We need alternatives to your antibodies doctor. If it is engineered to mutate in response to non-Edo antibodies, it may have hundreds of possible configurations.”

“The only consolation is that it appears that Bajorans can’t even carry the virus. Ambassador Els may be able to go to Parliament without us.”

“Some consolation, Nurse Ogawa.” Gordon said suspiciously. “Bashir, with your permission I’m going to take a sample of your blood. It could be a potentially good base for starting trials of antivirals. We need to start looking for ways to treat those who are infected as well.”

“Sounds good to me, take all of it…”

“Doctor!” Crusher complained immediately.

“I’m joking,” Julian laughed. “But please do take some of my blood, I’m curious as well. No Doctor,” he interrupted further objections from Crusher. “I knew what I was getting into the moment I injected myself with the Edo virus. I fully expected this as one possible outcome of that act.”

“Fell on your own sword, so to speak…” Doctor Gordon said, smiling a little as he prepared a syringe to take the sample.

Julian rounded on him, eyes fiery and causing the man to take a defensive step back.

“You seem to be almost enjoying my misery Doctor Gordon. Is there something about me that you dislike so much?”

“Doctors please,” Crusher said, teeth gritted. “Not now.”

“No, let's have it out now, and not later in front of the patients,” Gordon stated, smoothing his hands over his short gray hair before he lifted his face in order to look down his nose at Julian. “It is my opinion that this man should never have been here. This man shouldn’t even be practicing medicine. And that this man may even be the reason why the virus has chosen to mutate, infecting us now as well as the Edo.”

“ _This_ man is not contagious, read your own tricorder.” Julian said, tensely. “ _This_ man knows that being in Starfleet is restricted for Augments. _This_ man was fully ready to resign from Starfleet and accept responsibility!”

“Then what stopped you doctor? What is stopping you _now_?”

Julian blanked, and then realized most of what happened with his parents was under the strange classification of his personnel file, which meant that everyone but Captain Jellico and Picard were in the dark about the circumstances surrounding the revealing of his enhancements. 

“My parents got there first,” Julian continued as he slowly put his hands back in his pockets, lowering his head. “I went up to Captain Sisko’s office with my resignation and confession all written up, and found my parents and an Admiral there, who had worked things out in advance,” he jerked his gaze back to Gordon’s stiffened face. “My father offered to take all the responsibility for having me genetically engineered, and for my attending starfleet under false medical records, and _he_ would go to prison for it, and I would keep my career. Two years in prison. My mom,” Julian shivered, his voice going as brittle as he was starting to feel. “Sold the house, and moved into a women’s dorm with other wives of prisoners there, in order to be able to visit him every week on visiting day. She volunteers at the women’s prison there in order to fill her empty life with something of meaning. She’s a housewife, she’s lost her source of pride, and passion, caring for my dad and sewing for him, and _singing_ for him, was all she knew how to do, and all she wanted to do. My parents gave up everything for me...and I won’t go into the nitty gritty of what they gave up just to have me engineered and why they did it, that is far too personal, just that...well…” he shuddered and couldn’t speak anymore. 

He now knew how expensive his R2B- blood would have to have been. When his father had often joked to him that he had sold a kidney to pay for his enhancements, he must not have been kidding.

“Oh Doctor…” Ogawa’s breathed word broke the tension in the air a little.

The tense moment was almost broken by the _Farragut_ ’s doctor, Janet O’Connor, stumbling into the tent and grabbing herself some coffee before taking sight of Bashir in sudden startlement.

“What on earth...?”

“Doctor, you still create a problem in the medical community,” Gordon continued mercilessly, ignoring her interruption. “How are we to compete with someone like you?”

“Medicine is not a competition,” Crusher said firmly, her own temper rising. “Does it matter who is on the team as long as we find a solution for this mess?”

“I disagree, it is not just a competition, it is survival of the fittest,” Gordon countered scornfully. “What is Starfleet medical? It is one person making discoveries, hoping to make them before others do, hoping to get your name out there so that you have the political clout to make even larger far reaching decisions, like how many doctors are under your command, how many supplies you have sent to you on a regular basis for your research. Research cannot be done without Starfleet’s support, and they don’t support doctors with nothing to show for their efforts. They support the shooting stars, like yourself, and like Doctor Bashir. Who can only shoot as high as he can because he’s genetically engineered. How can I not feel the unfairness of this? Does my research mean less because it takes more time than his? Will he get more support as a result? It’s a very real problem, don’t you see?”

“That is a problem with Starfleet medical being controlled by Starfleet, not with Bashir,” Doctor O’Connor had a very uncomfortable look on her face. She was still standing near the coffee pot like a deer who had stumbled upon a pack of wolves unsure of whether to run or stand still and hope they didn’t spot her. “There are many advanced Doctors, like Vulcans, who can work as quickly and intelligently as he can, and still don’t get the resources they need. You were telling me about that, yesterday, Doctor Crusher? Doctors need creativity and personal motivation to do groundbreaking work, and you can’t engineer that.”

“Exactly. Competition is as fierce as it is because Starfleet controls the resources, not Starfleet Medical. And Starfleet always prefers results over good intentions.”

“Actually, Doctor Gordon, you are right, it is a competition,” Julian decided, choosing to continue the previous conversation rather than taking advantage of their attempt to change the subject. The looks on their faces caused him to chuckle. “But we are not racing against each other, friends. We’re racing against genetically engineered Doctors, that part is _true_. But they are genetically engineered _Dominion_ doctors,” he felt the fire filling his eyes and saw sudden determination filling theirs. “And _Dominion_ scientists. _Dominion_ soldiers, Jem’Hadar and Vorta, all augmented, but not as strong or as smart as I am, at least I hope not,” Bashir rubbed his hands together absently, the itch was beginning to annoy him more than anything else. “Yes, Doctor Gordon, I do present a barrier for ambitious doctors who want to advance their careers and their work, if that is really all they care about. Well I also care about my career, even if I don’t deserve to have it. And I won’t take some obscure little assignment on a distant asteroid somewhere away from the ambitious players who might take offense at the challenge I present,” he turned to look hard at Gordon, who seemed rather more fascinated now than offended. “I will not suppress my talents to the detriment of those that might need them, like the Edo. My parents gave up everything to give me wings, so forgive me if I choose to soar as high as I can, and make their sacrifice worth it by saving lives. That is why I’m a doctor, to save lives. That is why I haven’t quit, and why I refuse to quit now, or anytime soon. I have value, and whatever good I can do with my skills will hopefully outweigh any evil I cause for my _existence_ ,” Nurse Ogawa gasped. “I...hope that answers your questions, Doctor.”

“It does. But be careful how high you soar,” Gordon warned, more caution and less harshness in his voice. “Icarus flew too close to the sun, and his wings melted away. You cannot save lives if you burn yourself in trying.”

Back to the point then. His port wine stain. His Mark of Cain.

“Icarus was a child playing with fire, but I am a phoenix,” said Julian. “Watch me burn away all the doubt and criticism. I’m going to _help you_ with your serum trials Doctor, and start a trial of my own as well, but using local plants and flora and fauna, rather than the standard chemical bases, in the same way I did with the Teplan Blight. Let's race together, so you can see for yourself why the fire is nothing to be afraid of.”

A long silence followed. Some people were more impatient than others.

“A temporary truce at least gentlemen?” Crusher pleaded, breaking the heavy air. “They’ll all be waking up soon.”

“Truce,” agreed both men in unison. “In the meantime,” Julian added. “I’ll step down as senior doctor and defer to Doctor Crusher, who has had more experience dealing with large planetary relief efforts like this.”

“Thank you,” Gordon said. “I still have much to be concerned about you and would feel more comfortable with that arrangement.”

“But it can wait for another time to discuss,” Crusher insisted and they all got to work, and O’Connor joined them, relieved to finally be able to get her day started.

Julian took the olive branch proffered by Gordon and tucked it under his wing for good measure, mentally thinking of ways in which he could help Doctor Gordon with his other research projects once this was all over. Collaboration was often key to making friends, he had found. Doctor Crusher had been in his network since he met her. She had taught one of his classes at the academy and had been the head of Starfleet medical for a time. And as for Janet O’Connor, her ship regularly visited DS9 so she was already in his network of Doctors for research by proxy of their research frequently crossing streams. So he already had two individuals here who could help him leverage Gordon into joining his research network, if he was as keen about advancing his research as he made himself out to be.

And here on Edo, they would need all the doctors they could get. It was time to call in some favors, and to see just how influential the title _of haj a kai_ was amongst the doctors of Bajor.

\-----

“Mutated?”

“It still isn’t fatal to humans, not yet anyway,” Picard said, remembering how Nechayev had argued in his favor against Riker about his decision to go to the planet. “The virus is mutating in response to the antibodies of the non-Edo away team members. Although we now know the Edo virus cannot be contracted by Bajorans at all, and is only fatal to the Edo themselves. Still, as of this moment I am implementing the strongest level of quarantine for all teams currently down here, and all those who beamed back up are barred from returning. No more physical interaction between teams on the ground and everything replicated, no more transporting or sharing of supplies and only digital contact through radio and video communications.”

“Jellico will complain, but I do not blame you for your level of caution. I never would have let more teams go down had I known how serious the situation would become.”

Silence filled the air momentarily at the unspoken reality of what full quarantine meant. Potentially the end of the Edo race if they couldn’t find a cure. This sort of genetically engineered virus was so insidious, and it would take such incomprehensible callousness towards the Edo to create it specifically to kill them. Picard severely wanted to know why.

“Let's change the subject to something more cheerful,” Picard decided, breaking the silence in his own droll way. “We have made some progress in our study of the Edo God space station.”

“Progress?” Nacheyev seemed interested. “Have you found anything useful?”

“According to Data, there are no records on the station, nothing was stored there. The station on our side of the universe is a sort of holographic emitter array, using mostly holograms and subspace signals to send and receive information. The bulk of their technology must exist on the other side of the galaxy or another dimension somewhere. However Commander LaForge says the holography of the alien ship is well advanced enough from our own that it is worth getting permission from the Edo to send parts of the station to Daystrom for study.”

“Holography Captain?” Nacheyev was skeptical at best. Her interest would be primarily in how Starfleet could use this technology for advancing space exploration.

“Think beyond holodeck recreation, Admiral. Imagine being able to use holo emitters for everything non-essential, like chairs and tables, doors and…”

“Windows?” Nacheyev was still not amused. “Captain…”

“The Edo God had a holographic PADD that she could interact with to control all the functions of her space station. Imagine having a PADD that appears and disappears when you need it,” Picard was feeling his excitement grow. “One you can bring anywhere with you, down to a planet on an away mission, for example. A tricorder maybe? Replicators? Storage needed for computer equipment and supplies on a ship would be nothing more than a couple of isolinear rods and portable projectors attached to your uniform.”

Nacheyev widened her eyes a bit, and laughed.

“All right, Jean-Luc, I see your point. Ships could theoretically then become a frame with systems we interact with that create everything we need from energy and light. Which leaves room for more officers and more research. It has value for Starfleet. So,” she cut to the chase. “How long until this miraculous technology can be ours to control?”

“Oh you know how long these things take,” Picard sighed, some of the wind leaving his sails. “You’ll have to ask Daystrom’s scientists, reverse engineering technology is their strong suit.”

“Indeed. Well I hope it's not too far off. I rather fancy having a holographic counterpart that allows me to interact with you in real time on the planet whenever I fancy, rather than sitting here wondering what the hell is going on until you contact me.”

“My apologies, I’ll try to report back to you more regularly,” he promised. “At least until the quarantine is lifted and we can speak face to face again.”

“Hopefully soon, Picard,” Nacheyev decided. “Meanwhile I need to decide which ship will be used to transport all these delegates to Parliament of the two that still have captains on board. The ships are identical in design and capabilities, both have the room now that they have so many of their people stuck on the planet, and both captains are terrible diplomats so they would be very quick about getting the delegates there, and coming back to the planet quickly.”

Picard could not help but chuckle at her description of the other two captains.

“Well then why not send both? One to be the official escort and one to defend the escort ship, the Dominion is still out there after all.”

“You make a valid point. We just need Ambassador Els to join us up here and we can leave.”

“Parliament will still have to wait for Els Renora,” Picard said. “She’s been helping me in petitioning the Edo to join the Federation.” 

“Which would go a long way to solidifying Federation control in this area and unify this region a little more, which Parliament will like. What does the Ambassador think of the Edo situation?”

“She’s really concerned for the Edo people themselves, their mental state of being, and has become completely besotted by their culture. A mother hen and her chicks so to speak. And Rivan speaks highly of her since she’s very respectful of their religious beliefs. Whereas I’m still trying to convince half of the away teams to refer to the space station as the Edo’s God rather than a hulking mess of metal.” 

“But you should know that it takes more than just simply respecting the faith of others, Captain,” said Nacheyev. “Which is what the peace process on Parliament right now is about; other worlds’ objections to Parliament joining the Federation because they want to retain their faith based law systems and Parliament still provides diplomatic and supplementary support to many of these worlds. Especially the Anticans, who are now in some conflict with their neighbors again and want Starfleet kept severely out of the negotiations in every way shape and form. But Parliament isn’t Starfleet just because it is Federation, and many people don’t understand that.”

“We seem to rub people in all the wrong ways lately don’t we?”

“That we do. I’ll contact you next time Captain, once I’ve decided which ship to send the delegates with. Though you are right, both is probably our best bet now with the Dominion involved.”

“Hopefully Parliament will have already picked someone to replace Ambassador Els by now. She seems single handedly determined not to leave without Bashir. Her religious convictions will not waver.”

“I wish I had religion at times, it would certainly give me something to blame for all this mess, wouldn’t it?”

Admiral Nacheyev actually smiled as she said this, and when Picard ended the transmission he promised himself that as soon as all ‘this mess’ was over he was going to do something about this ice between them.

He could see the cracks forming already, but shattered ice can still cut, and he wanted to avoid any unnecessary bleeding. There were enough wounded egos on the planet right now to be dealing with. 

But at least Commander Data was no longer on suspension. Which was fundamentally lifesaving for them all, since Data would have to be the leader of the crash site away team party from then on. Picard would not risk leaving the capital yet, and potentially becoming a carrier for new versions of the virus, not unless the need was dear. Data was immune by proxy because he was an android. He could carry on without them if it came to it.

But Data was being caged now by something else, something altogether not so different in Picard’s mind than military discipline and duty.

_Love can be such a terrible cage indeed._

\-------

The air was crisp and cooling with the first touches of the impending winter as Lieutenant Commander Data wandered his way down the path from the crash site towards the Edo village, now known to be called _Sanyu_ , whereupon he took a now familiar side path from the main road into a clearing, which was inundated with tents; several small ones and two main large ones. The small ones were for sleeping in, or recreation, with the away team members staying together either singly or in pairs as they wanted, and the two largest ones were a space for storing supplies and a mess tent for food preparation and socialization, though there were only eight people staying in the camp at the moment. Many of them also did their research in the mess tent while having coffee or eating their lunch. Ensign Stark was frequently to be found in there with several pads in front of him on the table and a big cup of coffee near at hand. He wouldn’t be an Ensign much longer, so rumor told.

But the camp was becoming a bit of a mess, with supplies piled everywhere, open boxes and strewn electronic parts thrown here and there. If he hadn’t known better he would assume the team was being sloppy, rather than chaotically productive. It was almost a week ago that they had set up the camp for the crash study team to live and work in during the quarantine on the planet, and the second week of their quarantine was now dawning upon them, perhaps so too was the sudden reality of the situation. Many others had been here much longer, tempers were high, and Captain Picard had implemented a quarantine between teams, causing the away detail to feel much smaller and more isolated than before.

 _“For every mutation we find a vaccine for, a new one rears its ugly head,"_ Doctor Bashir had told him over their communicators, both camps were quarantined from each other to prevent the mutated viruses from being able to run rampant. It was usually random which of the Doctors contacted him for their regular updates, whoever wasn’t currently sleeping or working on the cure he would assume. _“We’re getting indications that the newest virus is already spreading beyond Sanyu. And we still don’t know how the virus is transmitted! Keep your team_ away _from the village and the Edo pilgrims, Data.”_

The camp was now profuse in bird song as a flock of Casswa birds had settled and begun building nests in the external framework of the tents, tiny beaks winding grasses and detritus around tent poles and support ropes and lining the resulting mesh with dead leaves and other materials. They then filled these nests with their winter stores of seeds, then sealed the whole thing by brooding on top of it the way many birds keep their eggs warm. But the males and females both performed this behavior, an interesting adaptation, for Casswa egg laying happened all year round and it happened not up in the air in a nest, but on the ground under the cover of shrubs and low lying trees. Thus, putting their winter feed up high must have been adapted as a defense against predation.

_Much of their behavior, aside from the winter storage of food, can be compared to domestic earth fowl such as chickens. Scratching in the dirt for food, bathing in dust, short flight, nesting behavior, similar diet, similar brooding nature._

According to the Edo these cute little creatures were somewhat domesticated and very docile, housing themselves close to Edo settlements and harvesting remaining seeds and roots dropped in the harvested vegetable fields just before the snowfall in order to fatten themselves up for surviving the winter. The Edo collected their eggs for food, hence why they allowed them to live so close to their crop fields where sown seeds would otherwise be vulnerable to these birds. In winter the birds turned various shades of pastel green to better blend in with the frosted trees and ground, but were bright purple in spring and summer to blend in with the flower fields, shedding winter fluff for smoother flight feathers. Since winter was not yet upon then, but spring was ended, they were in transition, some fluffy and green, others still soft lavender in hue. They could only fly short distances, and used their long extensile tails to help them climb up posts and branches. Their eggs were different colors as well, fertile eggs were dark green but infertile eggs turned yellow. Light blue eggs had been noted under one bush by Savil. Geordi had called them ‘Easter Eggs’. 

Data also surmised that these sweet little creatures, unafraid of the touch of humanoid hands, would become very popular pets throughout the Federation should the Edo choose to join as Rivan had suggested they might. In fact, he was sure someone would try to smuggle one or two off the planet in the name of ‘research’.

_I shall have to make sure to be involved in any research involving Casswa, in order to prevent this sort of theft of course._

But it was very tempting. However Spot would protest to have to share her space with another animal. His one attempt at raising a parakeet had resulted in such a scene, with many feathers spread upon his couch and other surfaces in his quarters. But she would not have been able to protest by consuming these sweet creatures, they were nearly as big as she was and had claws on theirs feet for scratching at the dirt for insects, he could well imagine they were capable of self defense. But he could also well imagine the results of such a battle would not be pretty, so no other pets would be joining Spot as of this time.

_But everyone is rather smitten with these birds. Well, now that we are quarantined, we should make good use of their...friendly demeanor. Certainly we all need such distractions for our increasing levels of stress?_

Case in point, Savil was sitting at her desk with her back to the rest of their shared tent, with a little green Casswa on her lap cooing and nibbling the seeds she was feeding it from her hand, stroking its fluffy wings with the other. It was such a picturesque moment that he found he could not look away for very long moments, and she had yet to acknowledge him.

Data took the moment to assess their tent, feeling a sudden shyness about her willingness to share with him rather than having her own tent, her own unused cot like an accusation with the number of supplies they were storing there, the rumpled state of his own cot quite telling to any who might enter to speak with them. Both of them were neat and tidy people, and yet neither of them had made the bed. Was this a common failing amongst couples? Or simply a symptom of their quarantined status?

_Perhaps it is both. But I should still be the one to make the bed, as I rise after her. I have no excuse for neglect, after all my memory is electronic._

They had also become rather domestic in their routine as well, eating breakfast together, going out to the crash site together, bringing back their findings to the main research tent then retiring here to eat an evening meal, going over their research and filing their reports together, then, well, sleeping. Most definitely now they slept. Sound and distance from the other tents had become a factor in preventing anything further. They had not realized this until after their first night in camp. Seeing Georgi grinning at him the first morning after staying together, and Barclay’s ‘thumbs up’, was embarrassing in so many indescribable ways. Intimacy would have to wait for their return to their ship. 

“You seem to have made a friend,” Data said, and began to share the thoughts that had been running through his mind. “I certainly think the Casswa will make decent pets throughout the Federation,” he began his usual lunchtime routine behaviours; removing his jacket he sat at their eating area to pick up one of the research PADDS to peruse. “Their eggs seem to provide a considerable source of protein for the mostly vegetarian Edo. We certainly should make a study of the eggs as a supplementary source to our camp diet of ration packs and…”

He paused. She did not reply, and had not spoken, or turn to look at him. He had finally noticed her stillness. Her silence was strange. Was she meditating while she stroked the bird’s feathers? It was not the right time of day for meditation for her. Always in the morning or late before bed. It was now afternoon. She was still slowly petting the creature, almost mechanically.

“Savil?”

She remained silent, but her motions stopped. He approached her and put a hand on her shoulder. She looked up at him, and he had to stop himself from recoiling upon spotting the splash of dark green that was now staining her right cheek. He lifted a hand to touch it, stomach sinking thousands of meters below the planet’s surface into darkness, and he mentally flailed for air, unable to speak. The Casswa bird had stilled its motions, and had settled into soft purring coos of slumber.

“It is the birds that are causing this Data…” Savil finally said, almost sadly, as sadly as a Vulcan would dare to be. “It is the birds.”

\-----

Lieutenant Savil’s infection had heralded the beginning of an outbreak within all the away teams themselves, and amongst those not infected a decision had been made to isolate themselves from the rest of the away party members for an hour to have a conference to come up with some solution to the new problem before them: how to stop the virus from spreading now that they knew how it spread? Only on Picard’s strict instructions had the away teams ended their separation from each other briefly to convene in a quickly constructed conference tent near the crash site. Only very specific people had been tagged for the meeting, those Crusher deemed absolutely 100% not currently contagious, and they had all been forbidden from going anywhere near the Casswa or the Edo.

Picard had risked quite a bit by leaving the capital, there were no signs of the mutating virus there, and he would not be able to return now that he had arrived. He would not have gone had Ambassador Els not been such a good arbiter. Nacheyev was communicating with them through video feeds to continue their talks.

“Report,” said Picard immediately as he sat down at the conference table, wasting no time with words.

“I can report that Lieutenant Savil’s blood is making the correct antibodies necessary to fight the disease in Vulcan blood types,” Crusher stated. “But the disease is adapting so quickly now to the diversity of the party members that we can’t come up with new vaccines fast enough before they become obsolete again. Ambassador Els and our two Bajoran nurses are the only ones still fully immune, and any of us could lose immunity at any minute with the next mutation of the virus.”

“And at the current rate of infection, I’ve estimated the death toll of infected Edo will be in the millions by the end of this week,” Data said, consulting his own tricorder.

“And for us humans, maybe two weeks at best,” Crusher finished. “Ensign Stark broke out with lesions today, the final stage of the virus, so he’s off duty. We cannot find a cure,” her calm manner at just idly saying that a man was dying was severely unnerving to Picard, and he looked around the room.

It was as if they had all resigned themselves to their fates.

“People, I came here to ask for answers as to what could be done, not to be told what cannot be done.”

“We just don’t have a large enough team on the ground,” Doctor Bashir was like a purple ghost, pale and hollow, yet despite the mark on his body covering nearly all of his visible skin he was still upright and talking and seemingly not ill, or capable of infecting others or Doctor Crusher would not have brought him here. “I sent all the information about this virus to Bajor in hopes that they can come up with some answers for us, and they have agreed to help.”

“Are you sure that it was wise to involve Bajor in this Doctor?”

“If Bajorans are immune by default, then they can conduct a proper, safer trial on our behalf. But they need samples of the virus sent to them, models just don’t respond the way the real thing does in clinical trials.”

“We can’t afford to send any ships right now to bring it to them, so I’ve been told,” Picard sighed. “Not for a few away party members and a less advanced culture like the Edo. Now if we were on Parliament, or a warp capable world, Starfleet would be scrambling to send us any support we wanted.”

“Ironic isn’t it?” Bashir said, looking directly at Crusher, who shushed him.

“And we are no longer able to create vaccines from the antibodies you provided?” Picard decided not to ask about the comment. Bashir looked like he needed twenty years sleep and several containers of plomeek soup. Doctor Crusher had put into her report that it was all he would eat because he hated the ration crackers, but he looked like he needed them. He made a mental note to order the doctor in private to eat the damn crackers like the rest of them. No excuses.

“My body is overwhelmed, I can’t take the risk anymore,” Bashir confirmed, and as if reading Picard’s mind added. “I’m damned tired and need a light year of sleep and something more to eat than rations. Sorry if I’m complaining captain, but we need more people.”

He said this almost as if he hadn’t agreed to stop taking the risk and was reluctantly having to admit to his weakness as a last resort. Somebody else must have stopped him making vaccines from his blood. Likely it had been Doctor Crusher, whose eyes were fixed on Bashir in sadness. 

“You work yourself too hard too, we need you on your feet, not in your grave.”

“I’ll survive, teacher mine, just a bowl of soup and some crackers, and I’ll be back on my feet.”

Picard took a deep breath, noting the closeness of former teacher and student, whilst pondering the Augment in question.

 _His Khanblood makes him practically immortal...Merde, let's not ever voice that thought,_ Picard mentally swore at the potential implications of this. _But what then would be said of his actions here on behalf of the Edo if he had simply died as a result of trying? That it was all for naught?_

When Picard had first landed in the village of Sanyu nearly two weeks before, he had found himself in the middle of a very tense argument between Captain Jellico, his Second Officer Carl Dolenz, and Doctor Nicolas Gordon, and they had been arguing about Doctor Bashir. Dolenz and Gordon both had wanted to bring the man up on charges.

 _“Illegal experimentation, sir,”_ from Dolenz. _“He injected himself with an unknown substance and risked not only his own life, but the lives of those who depended upon him. The Ambassador and surviving Edo."_

_“I have no reason not to let this man continue the research he himself started, can’t this wait until we are done with this situation?”_

_“No it cannot wait!”_ Gordon had said hotly. _“How can he be trusted on medical duty after such a selfish act?”_

It was a petty argument by men who had not wanted to be taking orders from an Augment. But Ambassador Els Renora had looked up from where she had been sitting, mournful yet wise.

 _“Some people would call what Doctor Bashir has done selfish,"_ she had said, voice soft and yet somehow stronger than all three men combined. _“On Bajor, we call it courage.”_

Now, looking back on that moment, Picard decided that Doctor Bashir’s courage deserved more than to be treated like a walking talking petri dish.

“No more experimenting with your own blood Doctor,” he said at once. “That is an order. Not for our sakes or the Edo. Take care of _yourself_ for a change. Doctors who are selfless to the point of self-destruction are no help to anyone.”

“I firmly agree,” Crusher put in. 

“Thank you sir, I understand,” he took a deep breath. “So now we’ll need to find another way to fight the virus.”

“But we do know that the Casswa are the carriers of the infection, this could be the key,” Data stated, injecting his own matter-of-fact mannerism into the somber discussion. “Since they cannot fly very far, the trade of eggs between the villages may be what is causing the spread. If we can shut down production of Casswa eggs and products between settlements we might be able to stop any further transmission.”

“It all depends on how long the virus can lay dormant inside the Casswa before passing it on to the Edo,” Bashir added. “As well as the eggs.”

“We need to test Casswa in every district, and destroy those that carry the virus,” Crusher said, and there were so many looks of protest she smiled. “Hopefully there are still enough of the birds uninfected in the other villages on the planet that the species will survive. But we can’t risk it…you understand, people before pets.”

Data actually smiled at this. 

“Well at least we now have a proper biological carrier for developing vaccines,” O’Connor added, injecting some of her lively positivity into the conversation. “Doctor Bashir needn’t worry anymore about that. Casswa eggs are perfect for vaccine production.”

“Agreed. Eggs have been used traditionally in the past for vaccine creation,” Bashir’s eyes were raw and pained despite her jovial comment. “We would be using the very source of the virus to fight against it.”

Picard knew how desperately this man wanted to help the Edo. If he had been willing to give up his own flesh for experimentation, how much more would he be willing to do? How much farther would he go? Picard hoped that he would not take anymore risks in his research.

“We’ll focus on dealing with the Casswa then,” Picard decided, adjusting his uniform jacket in that way that indicated he was ready to get things done. “I want your medical team to continue its research of a cure for this virus, Doctor Crusher,” Picard said, deciding now was the time to start handing out duties. “Commander Data and the other non-medical landing party members will coordinate with the Edo to route out the Casswa that are infected for their destruction and I will contact Rivan to begin halting the sale of Casswa eggs and products across the planet. We’ll meet back here when we need to coordinate face to face. I’ve left Ambassador Els Renora in the capital to take over my duties with the Edo leaders, and I think all contact with uninfected Edo from Starfleet personnel of any kind, even if they are not carriers, will remain forbidden. We need to stop Edo going to the crash site if we can as well. Commander LaForge? Any thoughts on that?”

“It's just too large to stop them from visiting, so our best bet would be to slow them down somehow, find a way to reduce the foot traffic around the crash site.”

“We could shut down the rail systems and set up roadblocks into the area,” Data said. “It may help as well if we designate a specific spot for their religious needs near the site, where they would be permitted to visit, but away from Sanyu and the other infected areas.”

“Good idea. I’ll include that in my communication with Rivan, have the Edo lend us a hand with that, so far Starfleet has been doing all the work. But we have to work together now. One more thing,” he turned to Doctor Bashir. “We still have no idea what reason the Dominion would have to wipe out this entire planet. With your familiarity with the Dominion, Doctor Bashir, I would like you to formulate a possible motive that might help us persuade the Federation that this situation needs a whole lot more support than this.”

“Well I’d start by doing a chemical survey of all the mineral and non replicatable resources in this star system,” Bashir was very quick with ideas, it would seem, and must have been thinking about this from the moment he discovered the virus. “The Dominion must want something here that having the Edo around would be an impediment to, so a ground survey would also be needed.”

“Agreed, I know Lieutenant Savil was working on studying the local flora and fauna, perhaps you can coordinate with her. And I will follow up on your contact with Bajor, they may be willing to risk what the Federation currently will not; sending more Doctors willing to put their lives on the line to solve this problem.”

“Too many cooks spoil the pot sir,” Doctor O’Connor interjected.

“But too few and the pot will boil over,” Picard completed the old metaphor with one of his own. “If all Bajorans are immune, and the virus cannot infect them, then they may be the only ones who can handle this. Our worst case scenario is everyone else on this planet dies and our Bajoran team members are trapped on this planet all alone.”

“Is Els Renora still refusing to leave without me?” Bashir asked, a look of severe guilt in his eyes.

“It is not you she is refusing to leave, Doctor but the Edo,” Picard lied. This man had enough on his shoulders. “Her sympathy and caring for them is most serious,” which was most certainly not a lie.

“Selflessness is stronger than any virus will ever be,” said O’Connor with a soft smile. “Doctor you _are_ contagious.”

“Thank the Edo God for that,” LaForge said jokingly. “Or none of us would still be here.”

Picard observed them all for a moment with pride. They were the best and the brightest, he was blessed that he still had them at his disposal, and he felt confident about their abilities and their mission.

“Very well, we all have our new mission parameters, let's make it so!”

He wondered if this would be the last time he would ever get to say these words again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more note: I read this chapter five times and I couldn't be bothered again when I posted it, so I'm sorry if any errors slipped through my readings, that's why AoOO lets you edit chapters here. I may start looking for a beta reader, and will let you know in a future chapter if so. We'll have to see, I have OCD and I can be particular about my work.


	6. Sacred Ground

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I admit, I didn't re read and edit this three or four times, I'm finding the more I edit before posting, the less I want to keep going. I can find problems after posting and go fix them during down times and when I'm checking for continuity errors or the like.

_‘We are gathered today to mourn the loss of Ensign Bryant Stark..’_

An uncanny silence had filled camp since the removal of the Casswa birds from the clearing, which made today’s funerals all the more sombre in their finality. The cheerful peeps and coos had ended days ago, erased by disintegrating phaser fire. The smell of sweet autumn grasses had fallen away to the smells of muddy earth and winter frost.

_‘Too young to have been taken so soon from us, with such hopes for the future…’_

Destroying the Casswa had been only one step in the process of creating a physical barrier between the healthy Edo, the away parties, and the places where the infection was running rampant. Hundreds of Edo were dying, and roadblocks were in place. Funeral pyres filled the dark sky with rising columns of fire. So much death...

_‘We will miss you Ensign Stark,’ Geordi LaForge’s voice had broken. ‘We will never forget your positivity and bravery. It's our job now to carry on by your example. Farewell, friend...’_

The frosted air chilled Savil’s lungs as she moved through the darkness towards the tent she shared with Data, feeling the cold reality of the funeral, the camp, and her companion beside her, stinging and rolling down her cheeks. His own face, shining under the moonlight, cast him in beautiful relief, as if he were a god cast from molten bronze, with the fierce determination and intelligence of the Vulcan race, but with no Vulcan blood.

“I wish you had told us sooner,” Doctor Bashir said, his brown eyes turned to look at her, scanning the darkness in the tent briefly before he strode in and began to help her move the bulk of the furniture out into the grass. She pulled out her meditation mats and lay them on the empty floor opposite each other while Bashir set up a basic heating unit for her. The temperature was rapidly dropping with the onset of winter and Vulcans needed a warm environment for this ritual “It must be unpleasant having to do this right after a funeral...”

“On my world, being married right after a funeral is taboo,” she agreed, and glanced out of the tent door towards the pathway where the rest of their party was heading towards their tents to start moving their personal belongings to the main campsite for good. There would be privacy tonight at least. Captain Picard and Commander Data were walking slowly along at the tail end of the group, whom Geordi had laughingly called the ‘wedding party‘. “We hope to belay that ill omen by delaying the wedding itself until...until we are both ready.”

But Vulcans recognized a pon farr mating as a form of marriage. To all intents and purposes, they would be.

“And then there’s the emotional stress you must be under, my god,” he was scanning her now with his tricorder to check her serotonin levels. “You will have to do this tonight for sure, blood fever will soon be setting in.”

“I was fooling myself, attributing my rising emotional instability to the virus, and not the premature arrival of pon farr.”

“Its an honest mistake, and you probably wouldn’t be the first Vulcan to come to such a logical conclusion,” he sighed. “But this is something your ship’s doctor should have known before you had ever landed with the away team.”

“Hindsight is twenty twenty, doc,” said Geordi LaForge, peeking in apologetically with a box of supplies in his hands to put on the ground near the door for her. “It's all yours now Savil, we’re good to go.”

Bashir put away his tricorder, then examined the oblong marks on her face and neck with his eyes before nodding. In contrast, his marks had been changing from bruised purple to copper red and were showing signs of healing, and maybe eventually fading. She hoped that would occur with her own.

“I think it will be safe for you to try tonight, but if Data isn’t _compatible_ then Lieutenant Taurik said he was willing to risk infection to help you. He currently has no mate, but he’s currently not infected either. So here’s hoping things work according to plan.”

She thanked him, feeling unnerved by his very open and clinical discussion of the very secret nature of Vulcan reproductive cycles. A compatible mating partner was indeed very important.

“Thank you doctor,” she held open the tent for him so he could use both hands to remove the remaining unnecessary equipment. He’d left an emergency med kit with the food and supplies by the door, and he said a muffled excuse me while bumping passed somebody outside.

Savil found a comfortable spot on the floor on one of the mats and began to meditate, closing her eyes and waiting for her chosen mate to arrive. A giddiness was in her mind now, unexpected, feeling the sudden presence of the familiar, an ‘other’ in the tent, filling the cold and empty space with a warmth that was not physical, but personable. She opened her eyes, meeting the reluctant gold ones in front of her. He had mirrored her posture on the opposite mat, but the curve of his shoulders was both apologetic and shy, as if he was responsible for her plight.

“Don’t be afraid _thy’la_. I know you will support me, so I too will support you in this,” She took his hand and put his two fingers together. “Come closer.”

He was warmer to the touch than usual, she could feel his breath on her face, and their breathing had become synchronized, foreheads coming together. She closed her eyes, searching, with her fingers and her mind, as one did, for that inner light, the fire, that would ignite the core of their twin worlds and bring the emotionless Vulcan to the pinnacle of all the emotional and physical pleasure that her race was capable of.

Outside the tent in the growing darkness, it had begun to snow.

~~~~~

_‘Bleep bleep bleep! The time is 0-700 hours, Edo Local Time.’_

Julian Bashir dragged his brain from his pillow reluctantly, hating his alarm, shoulders and hips still aching from the repetitive nature of carrying bodies to be burned, feeling his throat and his chest tight from the black of inhaling smoke for hours on end. It had to be him, Data and the two Bajorans on the cremation detail, everyone else risked further infection even from the dead, and repeated infection would eventually undermine their current immunity, and cause the virus to mutate further. It finally seemed to have stopped mutating in response to their differing alien DNA, but not before taking a good chunk of the landing party with it. Ensign Rose Danther, a Nurse trainee, had been the most recent victim, and the first of their medical staff to perish. Ogawa was just bereft. 

_She picked Danther to join them for this assignment. She’s blaming herself._

Julian finally rolled up into a sitting position on his cot and pulled his work boots out from under the bed to start pulling onto his feet, not caring that he was still barefoot underneath. He needed to get new uniforms from supply anyways, he’d been through nearly three; all of them had to be burned after burying bodies to prevent cross contamination.

The Edo had been burning their dead as well, up until the last Sanyu survivor had succumbed to the illness. There were now barriers and blockades around the entire settlement, to protect just the Starfleet team, walls of sheet metal put up to prevent Edo from crossing, check points to prevent pilgrims from going near quarantine zones on their way to pray to the space station, and to prevent Edo from other villages coming into contact with unaffected Edo. Due to the high rate of death, and the funeral pyres, the number of pilgrims had actually risen, all of them coming to beg God for a miracle.

 _No miracles yet, I wish the Edo God_ would _return and set all this to rights. I’m tired of death._

Other Edo were more practical. Their leader Rivan knew that ‘God’ was no longer in the massive structure that she had once dwelled in, and continued to encourage Edo to obey the quarantine over the Edo’s shortwave radio network. Rumor had it that she was being labelled as a ‘heretic’ by the most orthodox groups of Edo, and sects of different groups were forming, the religion splintering the way religions sometimes did as a result of differences in opinion over major disasters.

_No logic or sanity to be found there. And there’s nothing to show for our own efforts! Our vaccines work again, thanks to the Casswa eggs, but still only for us! How do we help the Edo now?_

Supply was able to provide him with new uniforms, and he changed into them before heading down to the mess for breakfast, where a large group of people were assembled planning today’s Casswa hunt. More and more Casswa flocks were being routed, the number of their species being drastically reduced by the Edo themselves, who now considered the entire species to be cursed. He hoped that at least somebody with common decency had saved some uninfected birds for research before the massacre had begun.

_Savil would, if she hasn’t already. She’s at least showing signs of her previous composure now that her personal situation is taken care of._

Julian couldn’t help the grin spreading impishly across his face.

 _If Data were a bird he would be a hummingbird the way he’s been floating from duty to duty,_ he chuckled at the mental picture. _And I can’t be more happy for him. Vulcans are devoted lifelong mates when they find someone they like, and they live a very long time. Data, himself, will live a very long time. Cheers to them both. I’ll have to share a pint with O’Brien when I get back, to salute the couple._

Speaking of Savil, she was waiting outside the mess tent for him after breakfast, all ready with tricorder and PADD.

“Today we should begin our survey of the planet’s resources, Doctor. If only until you are busy with the next virus mutation.”

“We don’t think it’ll mutate anymore, but you’re right, Captain Picard will want our report soon,” he admitted in embarrassment. He had incorrectly assumed she’d already been working on it without him. But they’d all been busy disintegrating Casswa and building barricades and roadblocks. How could she have been? “Just let me pawn off my duties to someone else and we can start from somewhere outside the camp, away from all this rush.”

Everyone was being pulled in to the main camp for Casswa hunting duty, but they were not looking for the birds today, they were searching for the eggs, which were needed for making the vaccines and which would no longer be plentiful due to the destruction of the birds. One uninfected Casswa would do the trick, just one, in his mind, and their egg needs would be taken care of. He left that in the notes on the PADD he handed to Doctor Crusher before leaving Doctor Gordon with his day’s serum test roster. Gordon huffed in indignation but secretly smiled when he thought the other Doctor couldn’t see him.

_He enjoys a good challenge!_

Having the entire botanical library of the federation was useless if your virus was very specifically designed for a very specific race. Finding flora and fauna on the world they evolved on that contained enzymes and genetic markers specific to their evolutionary history would be more likely to bring about a cure than trying something from Vulcan or Andoria.

“I think the foothills in the south should provide a large selection of minerals and rocks for a proper geological sampling, as well as various forms of flora and fauna,” Savil said as they proceeded down the pathway on foot to the stationary transporter pad in the center of the camp. “But we will have to walk most of the way from the south camp,” that was where the _Cairo_ away team trapped on the surface had based their camp, close to where they had first found Bashir and the Edo emergency shelter.

The two of them had to beam to the camp one at a time, transporters were running on low power as the _Enterprise_ , under Commander Riker, was off escorting more delegates to Parliament.

 _And the Selay still want Els Renora, probably because it will annoy the Anticans. What_ are _they arguing about_ this _time?_

The southern foothills of the Sanyu settlement were blanketed in snow, the bare branches of fruit trees and bushes that provided the Edo with much of their diet were frosted in icicles. Rubicun winters came and went quickly, but they came in fairly hard, with unending snow until the first melt of spring, which brought about flooding in this valley, and large explosions of growth in vegetation. Most of the Edo’s farming methods involved allowing harvestables to grow naturally as they would upon the landscape, only tilling the ground for very specific varieties of vegetables for storage in winter when the landscape wasn’t able to provide for them. This method of farming meant that the Edo world was mostly vegetation with very little to no industrialization or factorization. Their computer technology was simple and solar powered, and supplies were sustainably sourced, mostly from larger mineral and metal rich mountains and canyons, away from the valleys. The foothills Savil had chosen rose quickly, eventually giving way from the cover of forest as the mountain rock rose away from the trees into splintered fingers and deep canyon cliffs.

“I suggest we move more towards the crags,” Julian pointed. “Minerals and ores will be closer to the surface there.”

“Have you an idea yet of what we could be looking for? My scans around camp haven’t brought up anything that had been flagged as pertaining to the Dominion.”

Julian cast his mind back to that difficult mission he had with O’Brien, stranded with the Jem’Hadar, risking everything as he desperately ground plants and analyzed berries looking for an answer to a problem that could never be resolved.

“Fungal mats, if we’re lucky,” he stated, pulling out his own tricorder to transfer his records into hers for cross reference. “Also look for vegetation that feed off of mineral deposits, those may contain some active _yridium bicantizine._ ”

There were three difficult to obtain materials the Dominion used the most for the creation of their Jem’Hadar army. Two were used in the cloning process, and the third was rarer, that rarest being the _yridium bicantizine._

“If we’re really lucky we’ll find an active colony of them growing in the rocks. You’ll know it when you see it, it looks like yellow chalk veins.”

Savil must have been putting together the clues from his tricorder records herself as he was speaking. Her eyes were as wide as the valley behind them in sudden understanding.

“The active ingredients for making ketracel white, that is what we are looking for.”

“That’s right, and the bacteria that carry it in the gamma quadrant all live in fungal mats in mineral rich stonefields similar to these…”

“If there are traces of these minerals and bacteria here, then this would be a good site for a Jem’Hadar cloning facility.”

“Exactly! They have the resources they need to build ships and weapons, but their Jem’Hadar have this one weakness which they will have to provide for if they want to stay in the Alpha Quadrant. Starfleet would have to respond to that sort of threat.” 

Over an hour passed as they walked, mostly in silence as they scanned, and their scans were showing no signs of ketracel white components as they moved through the rock fields. Savil paused by a rock to double check her readings and Julian stood, staring at his tricorder in frustration. He couldn’t understand it. Nothing, no signs of any materials that would be useful to the Dominion. He wished he had several teams with them to search all the continents of this world for what he wanted to. But this was the area where the virus had first appeared, wouldn’t the Dominion logically want to clear out the most important areas first? Yet, nothing here would have any interest to the Dominion. Something new then? Some new technology? Or as a military outpost? It wasn’t particularly well placed way out here near Parliament, as far away from Bajor and sector one as you could get in the Federation!

Suddenly, a distant crackling sound of pebbles being displaced tickled his ear.

It took two seconds for him to drop his tricorder and jump upon Savil, throwing them both to the ground as disrupter fire rushed past them to blast apart the rock that she had just been resting on. They both scrambled along the ground to find purchase behind the shelter of a crag beneath the cliff face. Another blast, and he realized they were in a vulnerable position, and unable to move. He hit his combadge.

“Bashir to Commander Data!”

Another blast and Savil put her body flat on the ground and inches around the side of their cover to try and spot their attacker.

“Data here, report.”

“We’re under attack by an unseen assailant,” Bashir was already aiming his phaser, but the enemy could not be seen. “He’s high above us somewhere with a disrupter and we’re backed against a wall. Request assistance.”

“One moment doctor, the area where you are located seems to be preventing transporter functions. What are your coordinates?”

He had dropped his tricorder, and he cursed himself for such an obvious lapse in judgement. Savil sent their coordinates with her own combadge and tricorder, then peeked back out again with her phaser.

“A party will be with you as soon as possible, but it may be awhile…” Data’s response finally came.

“Understood. We’ll try to find out who our attacker is...in the meantime”

Savil typed something not-audible into her tricorder for him to read, and he nodded, and motioned with his chin. She slinked backwards away from their cover as he provided covering fire, shooting the spot where he had first heard the pebbles being displaced.

He was rewarded by the site of a pale form running from one rock to another for cover.

_A Vorta. Is he alone?_

Or she. Julian studied the area above their attacker looking for obvious loose boulders he could shoot down, but had no such luck. Savil had finally reached the point she had been moving towards; a crevice in the cliff face wall, which she slipped into effectively masking her presence in darkness as she began to climb up closer to their attackers on the rock wall above them. Now to find a way to lure the Vorta and his companion away from the edge. Vorta had very bad vision, which meant that there had to be another person firing the weapon.

Julian stuck his head out again to shoot, again at the same site with the pebbles, and the second form rose from behind the rocks with his phaser to take another shot at him. He was quite a familiar shape, and Bashir felt his stomach knot in recognition.

_A Founder. Damn, I should have known one would be here. Strange to see a Vorta being protected by a Changeling, though._

“Data to Bashir, estimated time until we can bring an away party to you is one hour, I am sorry but the transporters no longer function.”

“They’re probably blocking transporter signals and monitoring communications, there might also be a ship in orbit. We’ll go silent until absolutely necessary. Bashir out.”

Savil was getting closer to them, almost within touching distance. Julian jumped out to provide more covering fire as she slipped out of the crevice and was now mercifully much closer to the Vorta and Founder than him. She looked back at him, he nodded, and they both left their cover to return rapid phaser fire, the crevice echoing with the percussive blasts of their weapons.

To Julian’s bone shaking horror the ground itself began to tremble beneath them in tune with something stronger than their phaser blasts; photon torpedos. Rocks were breaking free of the canyon walls, and he spotted Savil, stumbling towards the Founder and the Vorta. He watched as the Founder launched shapeshifting arms out to grab the Vorta, and Julian saw just how much smaller than the Founder this Vorta appeared to be, the realization of what this meant dawning upon him just as the landscape beneath their feet collapsed and Julian found himself falling down, down, screaming into utter darkness.

\--------

_Merde! Is that….?_

Jean-Luc picard jumped to his feet as he could feel the first trembling aftershocks of what could only be torpedo fire, rumbling through the valley in hot punctuation to the sudden screaming of the emergency alarm set up in the center of the Sanyu village. He deserted the Edo house he had claimed in order to write his reports in peace. But a second sudden jolt and he realized he wasn’t going to get that peace today.

_Dammit not now! Not now!_

A young Bolian Ensign, whose name he could not recall, was running quickly towards him, and his face showed all the signs of a boy still undergoing the changes of adolescence. And lesions. He was lesioned, but was still up on his feet. Picard had to hand it to Jellico; he sure had a hearty crew.

“Sir! Commander Data reports that the planet is under attack from orbit!”

Picard shook his head, even as the ground shook under him. Jorj, that was it. The lad’s name was Jorj.

“Why did he send you on foot? Are the communicators down?”

“Yes sir,” said Jorj, reminding Picard painfully of another young Ensign who once sat at Ops on the _Enterprise D_. A sudden explosion broke the moment and the ground shook again, causing another curse to escape Picard’s lips. “The attacking ship is jamming our signals.”

“It must be the Dominion! Quickly, Ensign, run back to base camp! Tell them to prepare to evacuate camp.”

Jorj was off like a shot, and Picard could only lightly sprint along behind him losing distance and stopping to catch his breath. Officers were quickly approaching the area from all over the valley as he found his way to the still trembling camp, supplies and boxes tumbling over, tents already fallen, the metal supports of the barricades shaking loose from the ground. Picard steadied himself as Data came bounding over to him.

“Captain! I can confirm that the attacking ship is Dominion! We,” another blast cut off his comment and Picard could see where the photon torpedo had hit the ground, near to the Edo God space station. “Communications are being jammed, and transporters are down.”

“Commander! Captain!” LaForge had arrived, huffing and puffing from running. “The rescue team report that they cannot reach the survey team, they were on their way back before communications dropped!!”

“Start bringing people to that emergency shelter at the _Cairo_ camp,” Picard started giving orders. “It might be deep enough to mask our signals, we don’t want to be an easy target, and that shelter connects to others all over this province. Data, send out a distress signal from Doctor Bashir’s shuttlecraft transmitter, hopefully someone is out there to recieve it.”

The _Enterprise_ would be here in three days, but three days would be enough time for the Jem’Hadar scouts to invade, wipe out all the Edo left on the surface of the planet, and quickly take control. Picard swore again, swore and realized that Data was still looking at him, waiting. Oh. The survey team and their rescuers.

“I’m sorry Data, we can’t afford to send out any more search parties now, just bring everyone who returns to the shelter immediately. Savil and Bashir will have to fend for themselves, and let's hope they’ve found safe cover.”

“Understood sir.”

Said with the calmness and understanding of a Starfleet Officer. Picard was relieved; Data knew his duties, but Picard felt that he had to say something else as they started to head towards the _Cairo_ ’s camp and the emergency shelter hidden there.

“I suppose this is a bad time to tell you Data that I approve highly of your choice of Savil, and I severely hope we’ll all be there to witness your marriage.”

Another blast, and he grabbed Data’s shoulder for support.

“Thank you sir,” the android responded, and the pathway was becoming crowded with Starfleet away party officers, some carrying the sick and wounded, all headed for the emergency shelter in neat lines, not rushed or crazed, but with the dignity and swiftness of Starfleet’s finest. “I hope so too.”

\--------

Deep under the planet’s surface, Doctor Julian Bashir gave a deep cough and groaned. He felt the sickening weight of heavy boulders on his body, the leaking of blood and fluids from his midsection, the fog of unconsciousness slipping away into reluctant waking...and the sour acrid smell of vomit and urine.

He could not recall how long had he been here, and how many times he had woken like this, struggling for air around the crushing weight and the pain. And his memory was fading again...it had done that, he wasn’t sure how many times...he had woken, and slept again, and woken, and memories were _trying_ to form, but died as soon as they started to take shape.

All he could remember was his name, Julian Bashir, and that he was a Doctor. Whatever that meant.

How he wanted to remember. He was more than certain he was going to die, but he did not want to die without remembering who he was. He struggled to breath, the weight was suppressing his lungs, but he wasn’t dead yet and he would remember, as much as possible, he tried so very hard. A throbbing pain in the back of his head was beginning to nauseate him, his stomach was turning, he could vaguely recall that this was a condition called ‘blunt force trauma to the skull’ before the memory slipped away again.

Lost in his thoughts, he hadn’t notice the booted foot near his head until the sudden lack of weight on his chest caused him to gasp and struggle and reach for it, as if it could bring back the memories he was struggling to regain.

“Anzusa?”

Edo. He was struggling to recall this dialect, but he knew this person was an Edo, from the Edo world of Rubicun III. How had he known this? Why was his translator implant not working? And how did he know that he had a translator implant that would not be working?

“Anzusa? Miyshi noriyo?”

Struggling, memory blurring into his head, he recalled the language, forcing himself back to some semblance of knowing. Anzusa was ‘Doctor’ in Edo, or something closely related to that. Hospital maybe.

“Yes, Anzusa, Doctor, Doctor Bashir…”

Somehow he had to remember...had to remember...

“Humni anzusa, Bashir,” said the Edo, her long hair bound and braided with fabric ribbons, her body wrapped in heavy purple cloaks. His translator was working for them at least, translating his language into theirs for their hearing. “Anzusa nish ho shavat!”

Several hands were suddenly grabbing him, lifting him onto a litter, he could see nothing but blackness above him, nothing but blackness and the smiling blond faces of Edo men…

...men with unshorn beards. Women with long wild hair. And dirty skin and torn clothing. Where was he? Which Edo group was this? He couldn’t remember unshorn Edo mentioned in any of the records he could recall, and Edo scorned at keeping their skin dirty for any length of time.

Computer records. He remembered computers. And the source of those records were an important part of why he was a Doctor and not just a Julian Bashir.

_But where are they taking me?_

He could barely see anything else as they moved through the darkness, and unconsciousness was falling down upon him, and then he remembered suddenly he had not been alone. There had been a woman with him, in a uniform, with pointed ears...

_Wait! Savil! Savil!_

They didn’t stop, and he realized he had not spoken these words, consciousness had slipped away again and he was trapped again, in that cycle again, the sleep paralysis...the memory of Savil had once again faded off into nothing as he faded back into the merciless foggy embrace of amnesia.


	7. Forge of Blood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I suck with numbers, I gave some bullshit measurements here and there. I also don't understand much about how Star Trek technology works, so sorry if I get a whole bunch wrong throughout this whole series.
> 
> This chapter is a little small, but its exactly how I want it to be, setting up the action into the next chapter. I hope you enjoy the short trip down!

Silent was the current state of the _Enterprise_ bridge as the officers on duty went about their various tasks. Stars rushed by the view monitor in long streaks before them, and couldn’t have moved any faster at Warp 5, in Commander Riker’s mind. He desperately wished they could will themselves there in an instant.

_Active Warp 5 restriction zone, and Nacheyev on me like a hawk reminding me how much damaging warp traffic had occurred on this route over the last years. Easy for her to say when it isn’t her friends trapped on a planet under quarantine!_

But that was unfair to Nacheyev. She was quite concerned with the situation at least, if not the people involved. Picard had once tensely called her one of the Admirals he depended on the most to understand him the most, even if their personalities crossed.

_I just hope his trust is well placed. I now understand why their relationship has been so tense for all these years. She really is a bit of a backseat driver._

Next to him, his beautiful lover Deanna Troi was pensively watching the view monitor, her dark eyes tainted with worry, the frown like a scar upon her lovely face. He would bend the stars to see her smile, if only for a moment. She’d been under a great deal of grief and strain, feeling the emotions of the entire crew during this crisis.

Just as he was going to crack a respectful joke to break the silence and maybe cheer her up, a steady beeping beat him to it, and Ensign Caldwell at the Helm responded.

“We’re detecting a distress signal from Rubicun III,” he said. “The signal is jammed, we’re only getting the blips of message sent request and no message text…”

“The blips of the signal appear to be forming a message in Morse code,” Chalmers said from Ops, the attentive young man once again blowing Riker’s mind right out of the water. How many people recognized Morse code these days?

“What does it say, Lieutenant?” Riker asked, a little harsher than he intended, but implying flatteringly that it would be obvious that Chalmers understood Morse code…

“It’s from Commander Data,” said Chalmers immediately, and Riker congratulated himself for guessing right at the young man’s dedication to his studies. “Rubicun III is once again under Dominion attack.”

“Red alert!” Riker immediately stated. “Helm increase our speed to warp 9. Riker to Admiral Nacheyev;” he tapped the communications terminal on his chair. “We’re increasing to warp 9, Dominion ships reported attacking Rubicun III.”

He just barely caught the tail end of Nacheyev’s curse as she hit her combadge to respond.

“..mit. I’m on my way Commander!”

He chuckled then repeated his message for general quarters to prepare for battle before turning to look at Troi again.

“You’re making all the right decisions, with regard to warp, don’t second guess yourself…” 

She smiled reassuringly, and Riker was relieved just for the moment of the stress of the situation, her smile was all he needed to give him the confidence to keep going.

\----------

“Wake up, Solid!”

Lieutenant Savil coughed and opened her eyes, dust exhaling from her lungs and loose debris falling from her body as she painstakingly took to her feet.

“Slowly.”

She blinked, and focused her vision. It was painfully dark, with only a tiny emergency light from her tricorder giving any light. The tricorder was in the hands of another, a young Vorta, the same one from before. Somewhere above her the Changeling was holding up the entire ceiling above their heads with the mass of his body, his one arm shapeshifted into a dangerous dagger, pointed at her direction. He was without his disrupter it would seem, but she was without her phaser now as well.

“Are you injured?”

“I do not believe so.”

Savil assessed herself physically as she dusted off her uniform and made a very long show of catching her breath whilst nursing a sore shoulder, to give her more time to examine her captor. Her phaser had been lost somewhere, but she still had her tricorder at least, albeit in the hands of another person. The young Vorta currently in charge of the device was watching her curiously, his young eyes eager and excited.

“Start moving the rocks,” the Changeling commanded. “Carefully. The whole mass could fall on our heads.”

Savil looked around the small space they were sharing carefully, and quickly decided upon a location to start shifting the rocks and loose debris that would least likely bring the rest down. 

It was long, tedious work.

“What are you?” asked the Vorta suddenly as she worked, looking highly excited. “What is your kind?”

“I am a Vulcan,” she stated matter of factly, noting the uninterested look of the Changeling at the asked question. “My name is Savil.”

“Mine is Joyan,” said the Vorta, head turning to the side as Savil moved a particularly large rock. “Are Vulcans a very strong species?”

The Changeling seemed unconcerned with the Vorta asking her questions.

“Stronger than most others.”

“Fascinating.”

Savil would have said the same thing about the Vorta child’s curiosity, if the rocks hadn’t started to shift dangerously.

“Careful now,” said the Changeling. “There must be more debris over our heads than I anticipated.”

“Perhaps, if you would allow, I can scan with my tricorder to assess the area for the safest direction to go in.”

“Very well. But no tricks…”

 _So,_ thought Savil, _he isn’t able to move from that spot. Then he must be entirely focused on keeping the cave-in from crushing us._

As she scanned, with the young Vorta and Changeling both watching intently, she secretly input an inaudible distress signal with a wide range, and hoped that the away party, and her clever husband, would detect the signal and come to her aid.

“This way,” she pointed, and the Changeling shifted out of the way to give her room to start moving more debris.

She hoped that help would come for them soon.

\---------

Above their heads, artificial lights flickered and fizzled in the darkness. The soft echoing sounds of their steady footfalls were overwhelmingly too loud for comfort, but could not be helped. Logic had dictated that they would travel to the South in the direction of their missing survey team, and so that is the way they had travelled.

The sound of torpedo blasts on the planet’s surface had eventually stopped, and Data sincerely hoped it was due to the early arrival of the _Enterprise_ , in response to the distress signal they had sent. Several hours had passed since they had entered the tunnel, and many Edo refugees had joined them, coming down ladders along the emergency tunnels from places above them that probably only they would have known about. The Starfleet team shared their food, their water, and their blankets with these groups, made sure to set them up in camps close to the ladders that lead back to their own villages, and then continued onward, leaving only a few medical personnel to monitor the health of these Edo. The quarantine was now moot.

At routes along the tunnel Geordi Laforge had sent someone up to look for more Edo or their rescue teams, because his own artificial eyes had been malfunctioning in response to the Edo infection, which had finally shown up on his face where he couldn’t hide it under his uniform. Unable to see they had been leading him along, the frustration growing in the lines of his face quite clear to all of them.

“I’m sorry Geordi,” said Picard as they stopped at the end of the tunnel, which turned off in a direction they were not planning to go. “You’ll be staying here with Doctor Crusher,” she was also showing signs of infection, but struggling to keep working on the latest vaccine mutation simulations in her tricorder, most likely to send them to the _Enterprise_ when it returned. “Commander Data, Lieutenant Barclay and Doctor Gordon, you’re all with me. We’re going up to the mountains to find out just what the hell is going on in those mountains.”

“Typical of the men to take off without us,” Doctor O'Connell said with a laugh, patting Ogawa’s shoulder as they shared a chuckle, and then she started coughing haggardly. “You boys had better find the others, we should all be together at the end.”

Data felt the finality of that comment drop down into his stomach, as if he had fallen into a deep pit. Picard took one last moment to look them in the eye.

“I could give you poetic words of relief and reassurance, but you deserve the hard truth. Doctor O’Connell is very much right. Let us prepare for the end with dignity and friendship, we did our best, so there is no need for regrets; we can all be proud of how hard we worked and how much we were able to do with our lives in the time we were given.”

The last four uninfected members of their team shared their few last words of friendship with those who remained, Geordi and Data crying, and half-laughing, shared a remembered joke between them, Gordon took one last moment to confer with Crusher and O’Connor and Barcley looking isolated and lonely until Geordi called him over to shake hands. Picard tucked a finger under Beverly Crusher’s chin and bent down to kiss her on the forehead.

“ _Bonne nuit, ma chérie rouge_ …”

Soon the team was up the ladder and out into the silent darkness of the Rubicun III mountains, dark fingered shadows grasping at them from the setting sun, and the burning skyline was as red as blood.

“Nothing indicated nearby,” Data said quietly as he scanned with his tricorder.

“Very well, you lead the way, Data…”

Soon, the darkness of the mountains swallowed them. Along dark paths and crawling over rocks, avoiding sudden drops that were practically invisible in the darkness, their emergency tricorder lights barely showing the path ahead. It was at about an hour after leaving the tunnel that Data first detected the signal.

“Tricorder distress signal, about fifty meters below us underground,” he started a long scan as they all crouched on the ground. “About twelve meters forward.”

“Lifesigns?”

“Two certainly, possibly three, the reading is being interrupted by the heavy magnetic deposits in these mountains. I can detect that the amount of debris on top of them is quite considerable. They should remain where they are until we can find a way to beam them out, or mobilize enough people to remove the debris.”

“Try to contact them.”

Data tried, but the combadge was blocked.

“Communicators are still not functioning.”

“Why not use the same tricorder signal to send a signal back to them?” Barclay said, immediately catching at the right idea before the other two experienced officers.

Data immediately did so, sending the response as a morse code message, hoping that the person on the other end was familiar with old Earth forms of communication.

“Now to wait,” said Data.

“Meanwhile, lets scout further and see what else we can find.”

But they didn’t get very far before they were surrounded, suddenly, by several large Edo with long metal spears and shaggy beards. Armed Edo men. An unexpected event on this otherwise peaceful world.

“Go no further outsiders, these mountains are forbidden.”

“But our friends are trapped below, and we must find a way down to save them,” Picard said, taking the front of their group to show his leader position.

“If they are trapped, their fate is sealed, God has spoken.”

“Our people were carrying...something we need in order to fight our enemies, the Dominion, who attacked your God and your world. If we cannot find them, then it may be too late to stop the Dominion from taking over.”

Picard was taking a strategic gamble that these Edo shared the same religion as the others on this world. His gambit paid off, the Edo looked at one another and lowered their weapons.

“We know of the Dominion,” said the lead male, whose shaggy bear was gray and braided in knots. “They commit unnatural acts, children born from machines and not from mothers. We will take you to see for yourselves…”

Data took one last look of regret down at the rocks where the signal had been discovered. The survivors underground would have to wait. He hoped they would have enough oxygen to survive that long.

\---------

Drum. Drums pounding a rhythm in the darkness. Drums echoing along with the pounding of hammers, the throbbing pulse of huge grinding machines and thumping generators, the smell of oil and coal burning, the aching sting of dim light somewhere high above him in too large an area for such a small light, the smell of death and decay filling his nostrils, gorge and bile rising to his throat...

Memory returned immediately and completely, and Julian Bashir opened his eyes in alarm, jerking up in sudden memory as he forced himself not to vomit.

_The Edo?! Where am I? How long have I been down here?_

Hundreds of corpses were on the ground in this cavern pit, ancient skeletons and recently dead, dust from their bodies tickling inside his nostrils, under his hands, his feet, touching his skin, broken jutting bones and rotting flesh, maggots and worms crawling through the pile in search of leaking bodily liquids, the smell of death and decay fouling the air. His stomach lurched and he forced it back down, down, he couldn’t afford to be sick here, not now, not when he was this weak! He pulled himself onto his knees and struggled not to retch. This was the lowest pit of Hell, and he was waist deep in it.

 _Oh yes, I remember now, they brought me here after I...died…Am I dead then? Is_ this _Hell? My own personal Hell?_

It certainly came close; as a doctor surrounded by death he was certainly closer to Hell than he had been when he’d killed the Jem’Hadar. But he wasn’t bringing hell this time, he was living it. Here were adults and children, bodies by the hundreds, in every size and description, in varying states of decay, bodies that no doctor would ever be able to bring back from the brink of death. But really hell? No, he was far too practical minded to believe he was in some spirit realm. This was definitely the land of the living, ironically enough.

 _Remind me to send a nice thank you card to the Dominion for all of this,_ he thought to himself snidely. _And some roses...and chocolate. Vorta can’t enjoy the joys of chocolate with their limit sense of taste...the perfect gift._

Snippets of the last twelve hours in the company of the Edo miners came back to his mind and he crawled over the piles of bodies slowly, pushing back nausea and assessing his body as being somewhat healed, though his gut hurt rather badly and he had some recently broken ribs that couldn’t heal because they were set incorrectly. His combadge and rank pips were missing, taken by the Edo miners he was sure. He would have to put up with his strange new internal configuration of ribs until he reached the away party.

_If I ever reach the away party! If there’s an away party left..._

The Mountain Edo, as he called them, were miners and engineers, and somewhat less advanced than those in the Capital Cities and villages in the valley, providing trade of metal ores, minerals and gemstones to Edo in the pacifist regions of the world, in exchange for food, medicine, lumber, wheat and other supplies that they themselves needed.

Julian mentally compared them, rather ironically, to the Morlocks and Eloi from The Time Machine, though a rather more benign version of that metaphor, and he wondered how long this symbiotic relationship had existed.

_The Valley Edo certainly did not tell us about these people._

Below the mountains was a culture of humming machines and industrialization on the rise. As he had been carried through their mines he had witnessed large machines digging deep into the earth, wooden and rope bridges across deep chasms into pits that went to the very center of the world. It was a civilization that was growing underground in all directions, a complete contrast to the much more advanced but comparatively more peaceful Edo above that they had been living in lockstep beside for ages. It would be a race to see which Edo group would rule the planet ultimately, should they ever come into conflict with each other.

He hoped that they wouldn’t. But their cultures certainly contrasted. And once he had reached their medical center, and has been assessed as not being able to survive his injuries, they had tossed him outside on the ground still alive, amongst those also waiting to die. He didn’t remember being thrown down here though. It had not yet hit him that he must have died, or they wouldn’t have brought him here. Or had he? Some people could mistake unconsciousness for death. Had he regenerated before his heart stopped? Or maybe he had died and come back to life again, this did occasionally happen outside of a medical bay, and he was just looking for excuses for what he already knew he was theoretically capable of.

 _No sign of the virus on those Edo that I could see, lucky for them,_ Julian mentally changed the subject. _But it won’t be long now. I thought I saw a mark on one of them, I may be wrong, maybe it was just a bruise..._

Julian wasn’t exactly heartbroken about the idea of the virus spreading down here either, as he continued his painstaking maneuvering over skulls and carcasses and reached the rough stone wall. He wasn’t feeling very forgiving for being dumped like trash. He would have preferred waking up in a box. There didn’t seem to be an easy way to climb up from what he could see, and he mentally prepared himself for the worst as he started routing through the bodies around him for some means to climb with. The dead had been stripped of almost everything useful or valuable, but he did find two sharp broken metal spikes which might have been tools or weapons at some point in the past. He wrapped them with ripped pieces of cloth to use as climbing stakes and then surveyed the wall for potential ways up. With so little light, there was no way to know until he got up there how far down he was, but by the amount of light coming down, he had to guess he was over 300 meters down.

 _God...if there is one...I need more than just augmented genes, I need an iron stomach,_ he gritted his teeth around the pain of his injured stomach muscles stretching as he jammed the spikes into the rock wall and climbed, using brute force to do the job, trying not to look down, inching slowly towards the light in the darkness that would lead him up out of the jaws of death and into the clear clean air.

His ribs were absolutely _throbbing._

_I want damned well out of this place of horrors. I need to warn the others about the Dominion plans. Vorta would certainly survive happily on a planet like this, and they probably need something I’m not aware of yet for their cloning process._

Vorta also would probably take longer to grow up than Jem’Hadar, requiring much more education and interactive learning before their minds were fully formed. This sort of paradise would be perfect to create a Vorta colony.

_If not for the sleeping lion below, ready to eat the whole place up with industrialization. I bet the Dominion hadn’t expected that! It certainly would have surprised the Edo God, if she hadn’t already known. I suspect she might have..._

Well, none of them would be expecting the dead to rise from the grave. Julian found footing on the edge of a precipice, probably not the top, but enough ledge that he could climb out of the abyss of corpses and turn around to look down at the hole in the ground.

Now he felt safe enough to vomit, not liking the sight of blood leaving him at the same time, mentally thinking of what his next move would be. And whether or not he should attempt to reset his own ribs with this much blood loss.

_I’d better wait, I don’t know when I’ll be able to eat again...Beverly Crusher you warned me, and I certainly did not listen. I’m going to raid those Edo for food when I get out of here...and rally them to fight! Prime Directive be damned!_

Certainly the Dominion had a lot to answer for, and _he_ would be the one to make sure that they would, if not the Edo.

For all he knew, he was the last one left on the planet who could!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I almost got sick while writing Bashir's section. I hope you don't, its rather gross.


	8. All God's Children...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I still hate this chapter, but I'm tired of editing it, so tired. I may have forgotten something in this chapter, let me know if there's something that I overlooked and forgot to explain. There will be another chapter and an epilogue too, so I'll hopefully be able to wrap things up properly next time.

“Wait! Come back!”

Savil threw herself wildly down the cavern, the sound of the young Vorta running after her causing her no pause; the Changeling would soon be right behind him, the sound of falling rocks of the cave-in behind them indicating as such. She regretted the echoing beeps of her tricorder that followed her through the darkness as she searched for some means of escape towards the surface, some easy access where the away party once had been, less than fifteen minutes ago when she had been busy with removing boulders and had not seen their Morse code message until they had to have been gone. She was now running, chiding herself her impetuousness, and the noise from her tricorder which would give away her location. But she had found a steep tunnel going upwards into a cavern as she had been digging through the debris, and knowing that the Vorta could not follow her up as quickly, and the Changeling was stuck holding up the ceiling, she had seized the opportunity for escape. Now she was looking for a route to the surface, or some hole she could hide in to allow them both to pass her by.

She found something else entirely. She found Edo.

In the hundreds, they suddenly converged within the tunnel system, a large number that were running from some other direction, and they ignored her completely as they fled, but provided her with a large number of people to hide herself within. She could no longer hear the young Vorta behind her, she could no longer hear the Changeling. A passing young male Edo with a spear and a dagger in his belt stumbled and she took his knife from him when she helped him to his feet. He didn’t ask for it back, he was crazed, and his face was wild with fear and something else…

 _Desire…the emotion he is feeling is desire. I have seen this before. What did he see that he fears and yet yearns for so badly?_

He jerked away to continue running forward again. But she was suddenly aware of something quite strange...she had assumed the Edo were running _from_ something. They were in fact running _to_ something, weapons and tools in hands and armed with baskets of food and goods, strangely bearded men, very long haired women with braided hair and small children with their hair cut short and all of them with a basket or a bundle. One carried a large bundle of fabric and cloth, another was carrying jewels and gold, another was carrying bundles of flowers...one a large platter of breads...all of them were carrying something of this sort and moving very quickly, but all of them were saying the same thing, the same words over and over.

“The _Chosen One_ has come! The CHOSEN ONE HAS COME!!”

A sudden hand on her own made her stumble and she turned to see the chiding face of the young Vorta Joyan. How had he caught up with her?

“Don’t leave us Savil! We still need you!”

The Changeling was beside her, holding the boy in one arm, his other arm now once again a sharp sword point towards her. Ah, so that was how Joyan caught up with her. The Edo were disappearing now, the crowd dwindling into smaller groups. She had missed her chance.

“It is more logical to work together. I will not help you if you continue to threaten me with weapons,” Savil said, giving the Changeling a cautious look whilst holding her knife in front of her, the tricorder attached to her belt again.

The Changeling did not seem phased by the Edo running past, and by her weapon. He opened his mouth to speak a retort of some sort but another surge of Edo through the tunnel began crowding into them and a woman stopped to address them, putting her hands in the air.

“Hurry Outsiders!! He rises! He rises!”

“Who rises?” Joyan asked her, eyes fascinated.

“The Chosen One! He rose from the DEAD! God has CHOSEN HIM!”

Savil was a little startled by this; the Edo religion had no indication of their being any sort of Chosen One or Savior in their texts and traditions, not for thousands of years past. What could have happened for these Edo to suddenly start believing an older faith over their current religion? The Changeling was also perturbed, he turned to look at her briefly, thoughtfully, and then shifted his sword back into a less hostile arm.

“We should see about this Chosen One,” the Changeling told Joyan, then turned look hard at Savil. “You will be safer if you stay with us, I can promise you this. These Edo will turn on one another in a murderous frenzy at the smallest law broken, and you are no exception.”

Savil thought perhaps he was wrong about this, but then they were in a frenzy now, the massive group finally trickling down into smaller numbers as they disappeared down the tunnel. She appeared to have no choice, being stuck with this unusual pair until she could find help or a more reasonable escape route. As they traveled Joyan actually reached out to hold her shoulder as if afraid she would run off again at any moment.

A spark of some new emotion touched her mind briefly, then she suppressed it and let it pass. It was natural and logical for any adult to want to protect a small child, but she knew this child would not stay a child for much longer, and so she explained away the feeling the way all Vulcans did; as an illogical lapse of judgement on her part. Mothering instincts that would be better reserved for her own future offspring.

_If I have any..._

Stalactites and stalagmites had to be navigated around as the pathway widened out into large caverns, down further into the torch lit darkness where Edo were now sitting and praying; many were crying, some were working tirelessly on the bundles of sewing they had brought, some were trading this for that, some ate a little. The trio gently worked their way through the crowd, and she was conscious now of their eyes watching them warningly, eyes connecting pointedly with her and mostly ignoring the Changeling. Her uniform would be more recognizable than the Changeling’s boring imitation nondescript pants and shirt and the Vorta, as a child, was ignored by the adults by rote. And she had the knife and the tricorder blipping away at her hip, clearly she was the most unusual of the three.

Deeper into the large cavern they finally came out into an area that was open to the sky, craggy cliffs buttressed a mountain lake here, wide and circular, with the light of the stars shining above by the hundreds. Edo were bathing here, setting up campfires, tents and tables for eating at. Savil breathed a sigh of relief that she was free of the caverns at last. The Changeling wouldn’t let her stop, he was determined to discover the source of the Edo’s sudden religious fever. In fact now Savil could see the Edo were not just those with the beards and braids, the more familiar clean shaven Edo from the villages had begun to arrive, many with hampers and baskets of fruits and vegetables, their faces beautiful and full of life. Joyan gasped and pointed...some Edo were covered in lesions on their faces and skin. They had come regardless of the virus, unfortunately this meant the uninfected would now be exposed to their illness.

“I am glad I’m immune to the virus,” Joyan said to her. “Don’t you wish you were too?”

“In fact I am,” she said, and turned to look hard at the Changeling, whose eyes narrowed. “This mark isn’t caused by illness, but by my immune system fighting it.”

“I don’t have to fight, I got an injection that protects me…”

“Hush now Joyan,” said the Changeling. “I think I can see this ‘Chosen One’ the Edo have spoken of. How...unexpected.”

Very unexpected! The Chosen One was sitting on a big wooden dais that was draped in luxurious fabrics and padded with pillows and soft mats. A little waft of smoke rose from a burner of coals in the center, for cooking. As for the Chosen One, he was almost entirely naked, white fabric hastily tied around him, covering his lower half. This may have been because he had bathed recently, probably in the lake, his hair was wet and skin glistening. He was eating the food handed to him very quickly, as if he hadn’t eaten in years, almost ravenous, barely remembering to wipe his face and mouth with a bit of clean fabric a nearby Edo worshipper held out to him before taking his next bite. Savil followed the Changeling as he approached the ‘Chosen One’ quickly, a sudden aggression in the other’s movements causing her alarm; his intent was clearly to confront the new Edo religious icon and put him in his place as quickly as possible. The Founders engineered their Vorta and Jem’Hadar soldiers to consider _them_ to be gods, there was no room for competition.

But the Changeling’s rushing motion was suddenly stopped by Edo rising up and pointing weapons at the three of them.

“Stay where you are Outsiders! Do not come any closer!”

One of them had a Federation Phaser. Even the Changeling gave pause at this, stopping in his tracks and waiting to discern whether it was set for stun or disintegrate. He may have been immune to spear points and knives and spears, but he was not immune to phaser fire. Savil put her knife in her belt and held out her hands.

“I am a friend of the Chosen One, my name is Lieutenant Savil!”

 _We are close enough,_ she thought. _Close enough for him to hear…_

“Savil!!!” Doctor Julian Bashir sprang to his feet, dropping the fruit he had been holding and looking...momentarily guilty as the pulled the white fabric more modestly around his body. “Thank goodness! You’re alive! It's all right, Rondon, they can come up with me.”

Savil and the Changeling were led up the stairs of the dais towards him, the Changeling keeping his eyes firmly on Rondon, the Edo with the phaser. To her surprise young Joyan jumped from the Changeling’s arms to take her by the hand instead.

“Doctor, what is going on here?” asked Savil as she was quickly offered food and drink and fresh clothing by the Edo, which she declined for the time being. “Why are they worshipping you? It goes against the Prime Directive to interfere in the belief systems of other worlds.”

“I know, I know, I made a slight miscalculation as to how seriously the Edo would react to my regenerating from my injuries,” he turned as the Edo vacated the dais in order to make room for more food and pillows for them to all sit on.

“Only slightly,” the Changeling huffed. “Clearly you are making good use of their misunderstanding.”

“The Edo that live in the villages in the valleys have more advanced medicine, I wasn’t expecting this sort of reaction,” Bashir was watching the Changeling cautiously, Rondon moving to his side protectively. “As far as the mountain folk were concerned, I came back from the dead...well, maybe I have…there are a lot of different medical conditions that could have explained this...”

Savil knew that he was making excuses, of course, for his curious situation. She knew that people could be brought back from death, their hearts restarted, bodies kept in cryostasis for days until the right medical equipment was at hand to revive them. But she also knew that Bashir was genetically engineered, with blood that could regenerate his body, heal his injuries, and perhaps bring him from the dead. Was this what had occurred? Would he have been too self-conscious about it to explain it to the Edo? Had he already tried and failed to explain?

“So you were…?”

“Clinically dead, yes, I must have been,” he said tightly, not giving the Founder a chance to say anymore. “They threw me into the pit where they throw all of their dead, they would not have done so otherwise. Their doctors wait until an hour after the heart has stopped beating before declaring someone dead…there was even a funeral of some kind for me...good thing thing they didn’t burn me on a pyre...”

Savil could see him shiver and pull his thin fabric wrap around himself, before another Edo provided him with a more covering cloak of red, a color worn only by the highest authorities on this world. It was a cold night out, but the dias was being heated by a metal grate with coals near his feet, his shiver may not have been entirely physical. And if his unique gift for coming back from the dead was this unnerving to him, she could clearly understand the Edo’s own fervor. It would have seemed miraculous to them for certain, and how would he explain genetic engineering to them in a way that still wouldn’t make him seem strange and different regardless?

“What should we do now?” Savil asked him.

“Now, you have something to eat, and we figure out what to do about these two you brought with you,” he looked down beside her; Joyan was still clinging to her side, grasping at her arm. “We should also go see this Dominion breeding facility that Rondon has been telling me about...”

“Oh you mean my home!” said Joyan looking excited. “Are we going to go there now then?” he turned to look at the Changeling, who was startled. “You can meet my brothers and sisters Savil! They’ve never met a Vulcan before either! We were all born on this planet! It's going to be ours when the Edo are all gone! When do you think they’ll be leaving?”

“Joyan, what have I told you about talking too much?” said the Changeling, glaring with unconcealed hostility at Bashir.

“We will be going where the Chosen One goes,” said Rondon immediately to the child. “We follow wherever he goes, wherever that may be. Our ancient texts tell us so...”

Bashir took his phaser back from Rondon with an embarrassed thanks, and Savil sat down to refuel herself for the coming confrontation with the Dominion she was certain would follow.

If this massive hoard of Edo would be following them to the Dominion encampment, then it could only mean one thing...war.

_I hope Doctor Bashir knows what he’s doing, the look in his eyes...I cannot place it. But he is not entirely what I would call sane at this current time, and he now holds all the Edo in the palms of his hands._

\---------

The Dominion camp was silent when Captain Jean-Luc Picard and his team arrived in the company of their guides, the tall energy silos giving off a preternatural hum in the darkness of the mountain peaks that they had been led up to. In this part of the mountains, the landscape was pockmarked with Edo industrial towns, with steam rising in long columns from vents in the earth below them, where miners would be working, digging in search of materials. But these mines were now suspiciously silent. The Edo guides pointed at the silos silently.

“When they arrived, they said they only wanted to live amongst us and study our ways. But look down there…”

Picard looked, about twelve Jem’Hadar soldiers were marching along the path towards the energy silos and main buildings, with a long line of small child-sized Vorta following behind, all of them chanting mathematical equations that reminded Picard of the multiplication table songs he had been taught to sing when he was a child.

“The Dominion must be planning to turn this world into a Vorta colony,” Data surmised. “The Vorta may require something in their cloning process that this world can provide.”

“Hopefully the survey team were able to discern what before our communications were cut off. So we can prevent this from happening again,” Doctor Gordon was scanning the area with his tricorder, shaking his head. “I can’t scan very far with my tricorder Captain, the mountain deposits are still blocking our signals.”

“The mountain or the Dominion themselves,” Data surmised. “But if we can’t see them, they can’t see us.”

Picard was momentarily puzzled, and then realized that Data had used a contraction. Was this something new that he was capable of?

“I can see a way down C-Captain,” Barclay stuttered quietly, interrupting his thoughts. “Th-this way…”

Picard mentally sighed at the return of Barclay’s stuttering, and followed the man along the line of their rocky overlook towards the Dominion camp. The Dominion troops and their charges were now inside the main building, and the sky overhead had begun to fill with the sound of drumming, somewhere in the East away from the camp.

“We must leave you now,” said their guide. “We are being called home, go on without us!”

They left so quickly that Picard was momentarily left to wonder whether they had been here at all. Armed Edo men? It seemed ludicrous considering their previous fervent belief in peaceful coexistence, their unusual form of punishment notwithstanding. 

“Come down this way Captain,” Data pointed towards the left-most silo. “We can approach from this side.”

“Very good Data. Phasers at the ready,” Picard ordered, and the four armed Starfleet officers soon found themselves standing up on big boxes and crates next to windows looking in on the Dominion soldiers and their charges.

Unfortunately they lost sight of them going down a stairwell. The mineral deposits were still masking their presence at least. Picard thought about this for a moment.

“If we took them by surprise,” Picard said quietly. Data was putting calculations into his tricorder. “We might be able to overwhelm them.”

“My analysis indicates that this building is just a staging area for their troops, there are likely more facilities below this underground. These power silos seem overkill for such a small camp.”

“Well, let’s not beat about the bush, let’s...” Picard’s comment was cut off by Data suddenly grabbing him and throwing him behind the cargo boxes, behind him Barclay and Gordon had taken cover as they were converged upon by dozens of Jem’Hadar troops.

It wasn’t long until they surrendered, fortunately all of them alive; Barcley with a badly skinned and bleeding knee and Gordon nursing a broken shoulder as they were roughly hauled up and half-carried into the building.

 _Well, we’re inside..._ Picard thought ironically as they were hauled down dozens of industrial stairwells into the deep heart of the facility. _But how we’ll get out of this situation I cannot see._

The Jem’Hadar lead them down inside the facility passed Vorta cloning bays, which reminded Picard earily of Borg regeneration chambers. He could see child Vorta inside each of them, ready to be reactivated. But where were the adults?

Their team was lead down a hallway to a group of cells, most of which had Edo in them. Their phasers taken away from them and two guards posted at the cell. At least their group was imprisoned together, and Picard saw that Data had managed to hide his tricorder from the guards, showing it to them discreetly when the forcefield was back in place.

_“Captain…”_

Picard was momentarily stunned. Data had reached out to him _silently_ through the Borg link so the guards wouldn’t hear them. 

_“Data…?”_

_“I can create an explosion by overloading two circuit pathways in my right hand, and crossing them with my tricorder signal. However I will need time to make the connections…”_

_“Very good, but be careful, Data…”_

_“Understood…”_

Picard kept his face a blank mask as he motioned for Barclay and Gordon to put themselves between Data and the door so he could work without being seen. There were no cameras that he could see and he noted Gordon making some uncomfortable huffing sounds as he noisily had Barcley help him set his shoulder, covering up the sounds of Data working on his tricorder.

_“I’m ready, we just need to place the tricorder where we want it to explode…”_

Picard got up and moved over to the cell door to look down both ways. It was rather clear, only the Jem’Hadar at their cell were still here. Starfleet officers must have seemed more dangerous than the Edo.

 _“The cell door Data,”_ Picard said _. “We’ll have to move fast…”_

Gordon was now making another big show of tending to Barclay’s knee as Data inched over to the cell door and examined it carefully before deciding which corner would be the best place for the explosion, which would least likely to cause them all to get caught in the blast. Picard directed Barclay and Gordon towards the opposite corner of the tricorder and Picard quickly joined them as the tricorder made a sudden shrieking sound, blasting nearly half the corner off their cell, Data diving after them just in the nick of time. One Jem’Hadar was killed immediately by shrapnel catching his head, the other was thrown halfway down the hallway. Picard grabbed the first’s disrupter and quickly dispatched his partner. He ran down the hallway to grab the second fallen disrupter and tossed it to Data.

“My God man!” said Gordon with a huff as he checked the other Jem’Hadar to make sure he was dead. “You could have warned us how big that blast would be! I thought you were just trying to short out the forcefield!”

“I didn’t think about trying that method,” Data said in self-reflection, and then started freeing the frightened Edo from their cells. “Follow us, we’re going to escape.”

More contractions. Picard was severely cognizant of this as he helped Data open cells. If not for the sparkling of the electronics in Data’s exposed wrist circuits, he might have thought he had been replaced by a Changeling. But then he couldn’t have used the Borg connection between them either.

_“WHEE-OOH! WHEE-OOH!”_

The alarm klaxxon was now poinding in his head and he lead their team with the disrupter, Data taking flank as they sped down the hallway with their Edo charges. Four more Jem’Hadar came at them again, and Data’s instincts were faster and deadlier than Jem'Hadar, Picard’s more honed by fighting the Borg. The Dominion officers came at them in too small numbers for them to become overwhelmed and were quickly downed by the accuracy of the two men.

“Not to cast a bad omen on our escape, but where are the dozens and dozens that were on us before?” Gordon said, picking up a disrupter for himself, looking awkward holding the strap over his broken shoulder.

“We’ll just have to see for ourselves,” Picard said, noting that the Edo did not touch any of the weapons lying on the ground. Picard decided they were too heavy to carry two at a time and gently removed the power cells out of them to put into his pockets.

“In case ours run out of power,” he told the Edo, who looked confused by this action. “Don’t worry, we’ll protect you…”

_As best as we can…_

As their group came out into the main cloning facility Picard was nonplussed. It was empty. The Vorta children still slept in their units. But the klaxons were going off and no Jem’Hadar were arriving. What was going on?

“They must be distracted elsewhere,” Barclay decided out loud. “Someone else is attacking. I can hear disrupter fire.”

“As can I,” Data said, and they followed him up the stairwells towards a side route they hadn’t taken to get down here, out into a central cargo bay, where the main action was taking place along a jagged cliffside.

Hundreds of Jem’Hadar were being set upon by thousands of Edo, with spears, with knives, with sticks and clubs, piling upon the Jem’Hadar even as their numbers were being reduced by disintegrating disrupter fire.

“What in the hell…? Data! What is going on here?”

“An uprising perhaps?” Data pointed. “There, I can see a Changeling in the midst and...SAVIL!”

His sudden shout, and sudden choice to burst forward and run caused Picard to jerk his head.

“Commander, hold your ground!”

Barclay was behind him and they both ducked down behind a cargo as the Jem’Hadar began to back up towards them, firing their phasers upon the onslaught of Edo bodies filing en masse. Savil had disappeared somewhere, but Data was now shooting so determinedly that Picard had no choice but to join them. As he was firing into the Jem’Hadar hoard, which was quickly becoming fuddled up with the Edo, Picard spotted Savil again, being dragged along by a Changeling, who was also dragging along a man in red, holding him by the neck and a young Vorta was running ahead of them. Picard briefly recognized Bashir’s face before an Edo with a flaming torch threw himself upon the Changeling, who gave a shriek as he began to burn and released Bashir, throwing him across the room into a pile of crates. The Jem’Hadar suddenly stopped in their attack to help shelter the Changeling as he escaped with Savil and the Vorta outside. The Edo had also stopped for a moment, stricken in horror; not looking towards the Changeling, but towards where Bashir...and then they started screaming and were now throwing themselves at the Jem’Hadar again in a suicidal frenzy. How many Edo had come to fight? For a peaceful people, this in and of itself was severely alarming.

“Data!” he was closer to the door. “Quickly! Outside!”

“Yes Captain! I’m trying to sir!”

Data was trying all right, using the bodies of the Jem’Hadar and Edo that were piling up as a shield as he crawled along the ground towards the doorway, disrupter fire and spears were flying through the air over their heads.

“Madness!” Gordon said. “How are we going to get out of this? The Dominion is outnumbered but their weapons are superior...Jeeesus!”

A huge Jem’Hadar had suddenly risen up in front of them with disrupter blazing only to be startled when the damn thing was impaled by a spear, causing the weapon to explode in his face. Gordon’s own face lurched up to locate the source of the spear, his savior...Doctor Bashir.

The man was looking very tired, his body was now slick with blood, some of it from a head injury, dripping on himself and his arms. He tried shaking the blood out of his hair as he came over to them, red drops flying left and right as if he didn’t realized that he was injured.

“I just had a bath,” he complained as Gordon came over to his side to scan him with a tricorder, and Picard noted that the look on his face was almost as crazed as the Edo. “Where is Savil?”

“She was dragged outside by the Changeling...” Picard stated, then looked around for Data, who had also disappeared.

“Do you smell smoke?” Barclay said suddenly, looking backwards towards the doorway behind them where Edo were now heading down after the retreating Jem’Hadar. “They must have set the place on fire!”

“Damn, we need to get out of here...” Picard swore, even as smoke began to fill the room. “Everyone follow me, and stay close together.”

But the clearing outside the cargo bay was empty and eerily still, a contrast to the wild battle going on behind them, somewhere below. Picard took a gamble, a calculated gamble, that Data could receive communication from him if he just pushed a little, and did do.

_“Data! Where are you? Report!”_

_“Outside with Savil…she won’t let go of the child, he won’t let go of her, the Changeling has a weapon on them. I do not understand their reluctance…”_

_“But where outside Data?”_

_“Near the left most silo from the direction where we first came in…”_

“This way,” Picard pointed away from where the Edo were still rushing towards the cargo bay, from the path below, instead taking them around the cargo bay and up a set of metal stairs. The Edo didn’t stop them as their group climbed passed them up onto the main plateau of the Dominion camp, out into the darkness of the night, where they finally found Data standing perfectly still in the night air, his own disrupter raised at the burned and angry Changeling on one side, the Changeling pointing his weapon at Savil, the Vorta was in her arms…Savil gripping hard onto him, and he...the boy was holding onto her and crying. A mexican standoff.

“She needs to stay with us!” shouted the child. “We need her!”

“There will be plenty of Vulcans for your brothers and sisters to meet and learn all about!”

“Not like Savil!” said the Vorta. “She knows all about us now!”

“You were not properly created, Joyan, I see that now. We will fix you when you have your next procedure,” said the Changeling finally, then looked up at Savil. “Let him go now, he is of no use to you.”

“He is indeed,” said Savil, gripping the boy. “Beyond having the value of a living being, with sentience and intelligence enough to see the value in others. Beyond his being outside of your control in some capacity, he also has the vaccine you gave him in his bloodstream. And we need this.”

“I do not think you understand...the Vaccine he was given will not work in your bloodstream.”

“No, but it will be enough for us to learn how to develop our own,” said Bashir, coming up beside Data, and the Changeling suddenly realized they were not alone. “I’m guessing that he doesn’t have a suicide implant yet installed in his head, or you would have had him activate it by now.”

“No,” said the Changeling disparagingly. “Not with the First Vorta…”

“ _First_ Vorta…?” Bashir had caught the intonation.

Silence filled the night air, the sounds of fighting Edo disappearing farther and farther away as their numbers dwindled at last, combining with the rising smells of fire and burning bodies, and the sound of the fire and chaos spreading throughout the camp. The Changeling must have realized how drastically his fortunes had changed, and gave a sigh.

“A new Vorta line is started when we start a new colony. We don’t clone previously existing Vorta, but take the genes from them and combine them to create new lines, new children to act as potential fodder for creating new Vorta clones. First Vorta are unique, and become the basis for a new individual line of clones.”

“You mean this Vorta is literally just a child you haven’t engineered yet?”

“In a manner of speaking. He only has some of engineered genetic traits of the Vorta adults, we created him from their DNA, to start with, but not with the advanced aging or immunity from poisons and sickness, nor, as you said, with the implant, those are added in separately during the cloning process. Which is why we start with First Vorta in a colony. We need to see how the Vorta develops to decide if their DNA is worth creating clones of. Unlike Jem’Hadar, Vorta become our representatives, our doctors, our scientists. We must be able to trust them!”

“And this planet is certainly ideal, the right conditions to live in,” Bashir continued, voice thick with anger. “The right environment to grow the unique species of fruit that the Vorta eat and need to survive on. Isn’t that right?”

“Fruit???” said Gordon, suddenly realizing. “They did all this, released a virus to kill the Edo, invaded this system, because this planet has fruit the Vorta like to eat? You could grow them in a greenhouse!”

“Did you do that, really?” Joyan said, suddenly. “Did you mean kill all the Edo to make our colony? You said the virus was just here!”

The Changeling didn’t reply. 

“But this is representative of how the Dominion functions isn’t it?” Picard walked towards the Changeling. “You care nothing for the well being of any other race, save the ones you create for your own selfish benefit. You would destroy an entire race, their entire culture, so you can colonize a planet.”

“Control, that is all the Dominion cares about, protecting themselves by controlling, or destroying, other races,” Bashir finished hotly.

“What else would you have us do?” the Founder retorted. “We must have a place for ourselves here, if we are to get the control that we desire. And if our values and way of life differs from the Federation, what is it your place to judge us? The Dominion has existed for a thousand years! And will only continue to do so if we have Vorta to carry on the work they are needed for!”

“Did it ever occur to you to simply ask the Federation to help you find a planet for the Vorta to live on?” said Picard quietly, feeling the enormity of what this question meant, even as he asked it. 

“Pardon?”

This was said by more than one person, the Changeling looking genuinely confused as he finally turned to look at Picard.

“You found this planet by chance whilst negotiating with the Tholians over unclaimed territory, didn’t you?” said Picard, looking back at Bashir for a moment, whose eyes were wildly questioning. “The Federation has been spreading itself through the Alpha quadrant for centuries, if an uninhabited planet exists that the Vorta would be happy on, we would know about it. We certainly would prefer a peaceful Vorta colony over a protracted conflict with a viral disease that kills millions of Federation citizens and its allies…Even if it did mean permitting a permanent Dominion presence here in the Alpha quadrant.”

“You can hardly stop that now!”

“Quite right. And you are quite right, too, that it isn’t my right to judge how your society chooses to live, only in regards to it not affecting the well being and lives of those under Federation governance. This is our Prime Directive. But I will also fight and die to defend the Edo’s right to practice their faith and ways without the interference of others, just as devoutly as they worship their God,” Picard paced until he was standing between Savil and the Changeling’s disrupter. “This virus is brutal, and it has disrupted the harmony and well being of these people. I will not leave until either the virus has been eradicated, or I die of it. So you can continue to march on callously through space according to your own laws, settling worlds with your own people. The Federation will be there to see that justice and reason will always stand hand and hand against brutality, no matter who it comes from. And offer peaceful options, if there are any, to end such conflict.”

“Captain…” Data said, then seemed to trail off.

Silence filled the air now, save for the sound of the hundreds of Edo below them on the mountain paths, chanting and celebrating their victory as they left. The smell of fire filled the air...the compound was alaze and would soon be engulfed.

“I don’t want Savil and her friends to die of the virus,” said Joyan, finally inserting himself into the conversation. “I will give them my blood and then go with you. We can find a new place to live that won’t hurt anybody, right?”

The Changeling was startled. And beyond incensed. Clearly little Joyan had formed a bond with the Vulcan Lieutenant, an unexpected outcome in a day of unexpected outcomes. Picard could feel the triumph in Savil’s eyes as the Changeling snarled and left them, dropping his weapon and stalking off to sit on a boulder.

Savil quickly used her tricorder to scan the young Vorta. Doctors Gordon and Bashir hastily argued about how they would get a sample of blood from the little guy, until he revealed to them an injury on his leg which they could take a blood swab from. The young Vorta then gave Savil a traditional Vorta greeting, palms outstretched to his sides, and a bow of his head, before he jumped up and ran over to sit with the Changeling, who ignored him as if he weren’t there.

A sudden charged sound of energy filled the air.

“Is that a transporter?” Bashir suddenly said, just as the sudden white appearance of the transporter beams in question burst into sparkling light, followed by several Starfleet officers forming into their view, before a second set, and a third, and even more...Medical and security teams were converging upon their group, taking the unhappy Changeling into custody and beginning to treat their injuries.

One of those who beamed down was Captain Edward Jellico, who was grinning like a Cheshire cat as he approached them. 

“Guess who else came back to play?” Jellico said.

“You broke the quarantine!” said Gordon suddenly, angry at his captain. “You shouldn’t have!”

“Don’t need to worry too much, if we can develop the cure from the Vorta blood sample we took,” said Bashir, cradling the tricorder as if it was an ancient archaeological treasure.

“Well what happened to you son?” said Jellico, looking the man up and down as if he didn’t recognize him. “I’ve seen plenty of strange things, believe me, but you actually look like your namesake dressed like that. A bit too much Brutus today, Caesar?”

Bashir made a disparaging sound at being compared to an ancient Roman dictator, and Picard found himself suddenly laughing, laughing at the absurdity of it all; Bashir in robes, the Vorta child, the Edo warriors, Data using contractions, the whole equation.

“Well at least _someone_ is happy about all this,” said Gordon hotly. “I, for one, am still very very upset, Captain!”

“And confused,” Data said, looking at Picard as if trying to assess his sanity.

“Tell me about it,” said Jellico, who tapped his combadge. “Jellico to _Enterprise_ , I’ve found your Captain and the missing away team members, and we have a Changeling prisoner and a whole mess of Dominion buildings to search once we put the fires out.”

“We’ll beam them over to the quarantine camp,” Commander Riker responded through the communications channel. “Let us know if you need more people, we have plenty more to send down.”

“Plenty more?” Bashir and Data had both caught the implied backstory behind that comment.

“Nacheyev,” Jellico said, putting hands on hips. “Soon as she heard Rubicon III was under attack she called back the _Cairo_ and the _Farragut_ to join _Enterprise_ in the fight. We never should have left you here…Never should have left you...”

Picard could not have agreed more. If there was one thing he was going to take from all this, it was that Starfleet officers worked better when working together.

He would stake his life on that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope I captured Picard right, I knew there had to be at least ONE Picard lecture on the Prime Directive or something of that nature in this fic somewhere, with the Edo involved. Yay! I have no idea if this is how I want this chapter to stay, so it may change. Please forgive me if it sucks. If you like it, well, leave a comment so I don't waste time fiddling with previous chapters trying to make things work properly. I think they work now, but I tend to second guess myself.
> 
> Thank you to all the people who have given me kudos and support during the course of this story. I hope you'll stick around, this is just the first part of what will be a very very long series. X_x


	9. Patience Rewarded

_Snow...I hate snow…I hate cold weather. And I’m British._

White icy flakes were falling in fanciful beauty upon the Rubicun landscape, the clearing of tents and generators that made up their new, vaccine distribution camp was a pretty picture, a winter wonderland by most standards, with blinking lights and sparkling metals giving the impression of Holiday cheer. It was lost on Julian Bashir.

It was of course, July on Earth, another one of Julian Bashir’s namesakes that he was starting to resent just a little, and he kicked a single ice chunk away from underfoot as he stomped pointedly towards the tent he now shared with Doctor Gordon, shaking the dusty snowfall from his head and tapping the snow off his boots before he dipped inside. Nicolas Gordon liked clean dry premises to live and work in, and Bashir was inclined to follow his strange rules with regards to cleanliness and hygiene. He himself was a person of routine, wake, shower, shave, dress, go to work. But Nicolas Gordon, sitting at his work desk with a cellular microscope and sample dishes neatly arranged next to him, was a different flavor of ‘routine’ entirely.

“So how did it go?” asked the man, not looking up a hair from his work as he punched numbers and information into a pad beside the device he was glued to.

“One week, one more week quarantined on this frozen ball, and then I’ll be leaving with the _Enterprise_ and Ambassador Els. She really doesn’t want to leave the Edo until she is sure that Ambassador Seera is exactly what they need,” he kicked his boots off, then promptly put them neatly by the door before Gordon could complain. “It’s a shame the Selay are so adamant about having her…she really likes it here.”

“Its pure spite, in my opinion, they all originally asked for a Betazed, before the Anticans made a huge show of wanting to join the Federation.”

Julian considered this with a sad shake of his head.

“Do you realize the Ambassador and I have been here for over a month? It will be a month from your arrival by the time we leave…”

“A month,” Gordon actually looked up from his work to consider. “It has been a long time. I bet you’ll be happy to leave all this _attention_ the Edo are giving you.”

Julian bristled, but understand that this man was just teasing, and felt comfortable now teasing an Augment about his newfound Savior Status.

“I bet you will be too,” Julian chuckled, then sat down at his own workstation and...stopped. “You _are_ going back to the _Cairo_ , aren’t you?”

“Oh! Maybe, well, yes, eventually,” Gordon laughed, and sighed, leaning back in his chair. “I’ve asked Doctor Riles to take over for the rest of _Cairo_ ’s mission, they’ll just be transporting delegates to and from the Starbase to Parliament for the next couple of weeks, or however long it takes. It’s...it’s been a long time since I’ve had a long term project on a planet that I could really sink my teeth into, and the time set aside to work on it!”

Julian grinned, as Gordon immediately went back to studying the samples under his microscope. He would find quite a few medical and biological puzzles to study while he was on this world, even with the snow. And it wasn’t winter on the southern parts of the planet within transporter range of the camp. There were many different scientists who were now interested in this world and its unique animals and plants, who would be arriving once the quarantine was permanently lifted. It was only a matter of time...

“Captain Picard to Bashir,”

Julian sighed heavily, having finally sat down, and tapped his combadge.

“Bashir here, Captain. Please tell me she doesn’t need me back again…”

“No, Doctor. We’re getting a message from the starship _Destiny_ , who will soon be entering orbit of Parliament. Admiral Ross wants to speak with you, over subspace. You can use the communications terminal in my tent…”

“Thank you sir, I’m on my way.”

\------

The soft blankets of freshly fallen snow made a pretty background for Commander Data and Lieutenant Savil as they walked leisurely along the Sanyu valley path, Savil as bundled up as she could be, her Vulcan blood being more susceptible to the cold than humans. Data chided himself for not thinking of her comfort beyond wanting to go somewhere with her for a walk during their free time before lunch, and she had assented without question. Perhaps he should do a diagnostic to determine if there was a malfunction between his own memory engrams and his internal Starfleet library records regarding Vulcans…

“Data, what are you thinking about?”

A tricky question. Many years ago Jenna D’Sora had asked him this question, to her own folly. He had been thinking about the many different things that androids are capable of thinking of simultaneously. Now, however, he had the right answer to give.

“I was wondering if it might be too cold for a slow walk, if the cold temperature might be unpleasant for you. Would you prefer to walk somewhere warmer? We could transport to an isolated area of the southern continent.”

“That is not necessary Data,” said Savil, taking him by the arm and moving closer. “We both wanted to see the crash site one more time before quarantine ends…”

“Well, if you are certain,” Data nodded, noted her taking his arm more tightly, and hastened their steps only a little as they approached the giant mass of gray metal that had been evacuated by the Edo worshippers not long after returning from the Dominion camp.

They had a new faith now, and wanted to join the Federation just to belong to the same empire that Bashir had come from. Despite Bashir’s best efforts, and the best efforts of Els Renora, the Edo had found a new faith, and rumor had it that Nacheyev had warned the doctor not to tell them anything about his Augmentation. If believing in miracles was bad, teaching them about the _benefits_ of genetic engineering would probably be even worse.

_Many steps forward, one giant step back, as Commander Riker sometimes says. I wonder if the Chosen One is aware of how lucky he is to be alive…_

Data had calculated that the odds of an R2B- regenerative blood type Augment being capable of total body regeneration, before Bashir’s miraculous return, was, well, one to infinity. One to all other Augments. Only one had ever been recorded historically, so this was the new technical definition, but now there were two...and one of those two had been a potentially apocryphal account from a third party.

_I’m sure being compared to Khan Noonian Singh will not be something he’s looking forward to, regardless. Being theoretically capable of something is not the same as actually doing it._

“Now what are you thinking?” Savil questioned, looking curious, and no longer cold standing near the broiling warmth of the space station’s large generator base, which was still running, and would potentially keep running for thousands of years. It would be a very good endless power source for Starfleet and the Edo, if scientists could find a way to reverse engineer it.

“Doctor Bashir,” Data decided that honesty is often the best course of action. “His rebirth and becoming the new faith icon for the Edo…”

“It must be difficult to be an Augment, and not being able to explain his gifts to the Edo.”

“Yes, and with his gifts he’ll certainly live for hundreds of years longer than other humans…” Data trailed off. “It must be lonely…”

“Lonely?” Savil looked at him, her dark brown eyes were sparkling in the reflective glow of the chrome metal station hull.

“People who are unique from all others often feel lonely. I often feel lonely…” Data moved his face closer to hers, her warm breath on was now on his chin.

“Do you feel lonely now?”

“Now?” he pressed his forehead to hers. “Never when I’m with you.”

Lips met, and all thoughts of Bashir, the Edo, and the space station drifted away with the softly falling snow.

\-------------

“He’s missing?”

Julian Bashir was incensed, and immediately concerned. Admiral Ross’s sombre face was tellingly relieved at his immediate, honest comment.

“Since about two weeks ago,” Ross roughly dragged a hand through his hair, and Julian could hear his fingers tapping below the screen on the table. “Starfleet Intelligence has been on me ever since to find you and question you. But you’ve been out in Parliament space for over a month. You can’t have anything to do with it...”

“Why do they want to question me?”

Julian had a huge, frightening suspicion as to why.

“Doctor Zimmerman had indicated to Starfleet Security that he had been getting death threats from some anonymous source since your Augmentation was revealed. There’s no way to tell who the messages came from either, they were bounced around the Alpha quadrant like a rubber ball. But Starfleet Intelligence is fairly certain that only one person was writing the messages, and they think it was you.”

“I don’t know what to say, I certainly would have a motive if I were a vindictive person,” Julian frowned and thought a little. “But I’ve gotten used to being honest about my Augmentation. To be honest I wouldn’t want to go back in the closet, I feel so much freer out in the open than hiding everything. And...Dad’s been happier than I have ever seen him, working on his art, he’s got a fan base now among the prisoners, he really feels drawing suits his creative talents. If he’s not angry, I’m not going to begrudge him the choice he made, whatever the consequences.”

“I’m satisfied, but you know Starfleet Intelligence will want to talk to you as soon as you reach Parliament. So be prepared for that. And it goes without saying that our conversation is completely classified. Though you can confide in Captain Picard, he’s now your CO until you return to Bajor, transferred with Ambassador Els from the _Farragut_. I hope that’s all right.”

“That’s fine, I’ve been happy to work with Doctor Crusher and Nurse Ogawa again.”

“Very good to hear,” Ross sighed. “But, back to the main topic. Any idea as to _when_ you will be arriving at Parliament, so I can reassure Starfleet HQ that you haven’t hightailed it off to the Gamma quadrant by now? As if they don’t trust the official reports they order us to fill out themselves...”

Julian started, and then laughed.

“One week, the Ambassador said, and I’m getting indications that she’s more amiable to the idea of moving to Parliament long term as well. She knows she’ll be more involved in the Edo and their petition for Federation membership if she’s living on Parliament. Though I hope she knows I won’t stay on parliament long term…”

“Be careful Doctor, Ambassadors who take an inch will walk a mile,” Ross said, smiling from across subspace. “Just ask Captain Picard about his missions involving Ambassador Troi...it's quite an earful.”

“Oh no, not political gossip, not yet,” Julian said, fake covering his ears. “Please wait until I get to Parliament at least!”

Admiral Ross out right belly laughed at this, and then thanked Julian for his time before cutting off the connection.

_Now I know why Sisko prefers having Ross to report to. He’s just so incredibly authentic._

Julian stepped out of Picard’s tent, noting the man was still standing in the snow, talking to Ensign Jorj animatedly.

“Ah, Doctor,” Picard sent the bouncy young Ensign back off to his duties and turned to him. “Anything to be concerned with?”

“Ever heard of a Doctor Lewis Zimmerman…?”

“Zimmerman?” Picard thought for a moment. “Ah yes, the Engineer who designed our medical bay’s emergency hologram. I vaguely remember Doctor Crusher and Commander LaForge both complaining about him during his brief visit to install the program.”

“Well, he’s gone missing,” Julian looked down at his feet and noted their footprints in the snow that seemed so clinically identical. They must have shared the same shoe size. “Starfleet Intelligence wanted to ask me some questions when I reach parliament.”

“Oh dear, that doesn’t sound good…” Picard’s frown was telling.

“It isn’t,” Julian noted that Picard seemed quite fine with the falling snow, almost perversely cheerful. The Frenchman was probably thinking of Parisian winter fields. “I’m apparently a suspect…as he...was the reason my Augmentation was revealed...”

“Ahhh.”

Julian quickly told the man the whole situation, and Picard thought about this critically for a moment, his eyes turning momentarily wise.

“‘It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die, than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience…’”

Julian thought about that, then winced.

“Julius Caesar?”

“Indeed,” Picard chucked. “Your namesake had some interesting things to say. If I were in your shoes, I would not be waiting for Starfleet Intelligence to find some way to railroad you into the blame. Have all your personal reports, messages, and logs unencrypted and ready to present them for examination. Remember to include the time, date and location transcripts of everything, and your complete record of service,” Picard smiled up at him. “Including this entire mission and the commendations we three Captains all plan to give you, and Admiral Nacheyev mentioned an award of some sort…”

Julian could feel the red rising on his face in embarrassment. Picard pressed on.

“Don’t give them any wiggle room, Doctor, and don’t choose to end your career rather than going through this process with them. They will then be the ones who will have to ‘endure pain with patience’, and wait for the true culprit to reveal himself.”

“‘True culprit’,” Julian was pained. “You seem severely convinced of my own innocence Captain, I don’t think Starfleet will be as convinced.”

“If the aforementioned award and support from top Captains in the fleet aren’t indicative of your innocence, then I can’t begin to fathom what would be. Without any evidence or proof, I can only see any further action against you as a witch hunt.”

“Well, with Medical Order 336, Section 12, they could do just that without consequence.”

Picard’s eyes hardened thoughtfully. Medical Order 336 was entirely involved in outlining the Federation’s entire regulatory body of rules regarding genetic procedures in medicine, it was a meaty order with many sub-documents regarding various specific incidences and the responses to those incidences.

“It's been awhile since I’ve read the medical regulations. Remind me again about Section 12...?”

“‘Any Genetically Engineered being shown to have acted with hostility against any Federation citizen shall hitherto be considered a hostile entity and taken into custody until determined safe to release.’”

Picard blinked several times.

“That’s a very broad and far-reaching order…”

“Tell me about it,” Julian shivered a little in the cold. “The ‘hostile’ act is left open to interpretation. So I could punch someone in a drunken bar fight and fall under this regulation. Speaking of which, I think I need a drink.”

“Synthehol only Doctor,” Picard chided, and Julian gave him a sheepish laugh before turning back towards his tent, noting the look of extreme worry on the man’s face before he disappeared into his own.

 _If only everyone were...well...as_ noble _as Captain Picard, what an amazing universe this would be!_

\---------

“If everyone were as honest and brave as Doctor Bashir, what an amazing universe we would be living in,” Picard concluded. “End personal log…”

His conversation with Doctor Bashir earlier had haunted him. Had wormed into his mind and forced him to bring up the aforementioned law on a PADD to learn more. He only barely remembered it from Doctor Crusher’s past reports. It was an overly broad little rule hidden away in Order 336, not the usual step by step broken down regulations regarding medicine set down by Starfleet Medical, and it was originally meant for the protection of medical personnel during the treatment of dangerous patients affected by accidental genetic mutation and genetic viruses. But it was left broad to allow for personal interpretation of the presiding Commanding Officer and CMO. He quickly pulled up all the instances of this rule’s enforcement and noted amazingly how many instances had happened on his own ship! 

_Here are even my own reports! I wasn’t aware this rule was post-dated to so many reports!_

Geordi’s brush with the alien parasite on Tarchannen III was here, as well as Barclay’s Protomorphosis, examples of how this regulation was enforced or could have been enforced had that regulation been brought into effect. In fact Data had later added a note in his own report on the previous incident when the regulation _had_ been tagged to the file, personally commenting about how generally broad this rule was, especially in regards to defining the incident they had been involved in, and needed more clarification with regards to procedure.

_You hit the nail right on the head Data. I should have known you’d know exactly which regulations should be cross referenced in your reports and which should not. I need to pay more attention to the regulatory footnotes when I read reports in future..._

It was embarrassing that he had ignored the footnotes at all, as Data’s wasn't the only one that had been updated; Doctor Crusher had made a note asking much of the same on her own reports. Since most of the incident reports under this law were safe for public consumption, he opened a few not related to his own ship, and found many many more incidents by Doctors remarking on this law, but found that there were very few Commanders and Captains remarking in response to their officers concerns about the law. Data had been uniquely placed to write a medical report for that incident as he had been the one to distribute the cure. It was a lot of scrolling before Picard found one with a Captain’s remarks.

Captain Rhyme had agreed with her CMO that how the law related to their incident was not well defined, and further complained about having a separate regulation from the general orders regarding taking any hostile entity into custody. She felt it was redundant, again, overly broad, designed only to target a certain subset of potential hostile entities they could encounter. Her’s was the strongest remark made on this law in over fifty years, which was damning.

 _This report was_ made _over fifty years ago!_

Picard was scrolling up and down the lists and lists of incident reports looking for any sign of a Captain’s involvement when he noted one report, by Captain Benjamin Sisko, post dated this way. It was a bar fight of all things, which simply tagged a personnel file of someone involved...

_Doctor Bashir! He mentioned a bar fight as a way he could be tagged by this rule, and he was right! And if his file hadn’t been classified...if he wasn’t already aware...wait a moment..._

The thought trailed off. Sneaky. VERY sneaky! Bashir KNEW Picard would be looking at these records after their conversation. Had to have been hoping for it!

_That was very clever, Doctor, I applaud your discreet way of bringing this to my attention…Very clever indeed._

Doctor Bashir hadn’t thrown any punches during the incident in this report, as he had claimed in their conversation would need to have happened, so the law wasn’t valid here, and should not have been connected to this incident report. Bashir had in fact been knocked over a table trying to stop the incident, but was kept in the brig with Chief O’Brien and Worf for the night for his part in instigating the fight.

_Interesting...this had to have been post dated in regards to Bashir being discovered to be genetically engineered, since the fight took place well before then. No further logs were added by Sisko, who felt the incident was dealt with by his decision to leave his officers in security for the night. Does he know about these regulatory post-it notes left by Starfleet Security on his incident reports? How many more of Bashir’s records have been cross referenced this way?_

It was getting late, and he would have to sort through thousands of reports manually without a proper Starship computer in order to look for specific records. He would ask Data in the morning if he’d oblige him.

But, it did bring up a valid point. If a man like Picard, who had been writing reports for Starfleet for decades, didn’t know until this moment that a man’s record was being tagged by an unfair law, then it was quite possible that only those in Medicine had ever learned about this regulation to begin with, ready to make their comments known in their own reports, hoping their Captain would side with their opinion.

Because it was the Captain that had all the authority with regard to convincing Admirals to change regulations, didn’t it?

_So now what do I do?_

Besides yelling at Starfleet, which would not be productive, or making an official inquiry about this one file, which would put Bashir in the spotlight against his will, all Picard could do was revise a report with his own concerns, and that felt very useless to his thinking. Not to mention that he could only revise his own incident reports after the fact, not report upon another’s. The idea of it gave him a headache. With the thousands of incident reports out there that had been tagged by this law, his only course was the send a copy of the post-dated entry he had found to Sisko and query him this regulation so he could look through his own reports. Together they would come up with a way to address this problem without bringing Doctor Bashir into the mess too deeply, even though it was him that this was of most concern for.

_For all I know this tagging may be a computer algorithm that looks for any incident involving these regulations by keyword. Data and Beverly could have been complaining about a computer protocol all these years. After all, how many regulations are written down but never actually enforced? Still, I had better let Sisko, and Admiral Nacheyev, know. Admiral Ross as well since he’s the reason Bashir brought up the subject to begin with. Especially if the reports I’ve been making here on this planet are going to be...cross referenced to this law by Starfleet Security. I shall certainly be ready to add my notes once the reports have been approved and filed by Admiral Nacheyev._

He sent the letter to Captain Sisko, which he hoped wasn’t going to inflame anything new he couldn’t fix, and went about the messy business of preparing for bed with a cup of Earl Gray and a copy of _Julius Caesar_. He turned up the heating unit again as much as he could tolerate, which never seemed to be enough, and prepared himself to lose himself once again in The Bard’s poetic verses.

Cold weather camping was not his particular cup of tea. But he would tolerate it, if only under these circumstances.

\-----

Admiral Nacheyev wouldn’t blink. She couldn’t, because if she blinked, even once, then Ross would look at her in that way that told her she had failed in some very significant way.

“I don’t care how many Starfleet HQ feathers it ruffles, or what Admiral Novos says, I am not going to break quarantine one day early so Bashir can be there one day earlier! And I am going to let _you_ tell Ambassador Els in person why her chosen doctor, the _haja kai,_ and de facto Jesus of the Edo, is under investigation. You can break the news yourself on Parliament!”

“All right, all right, Alynna," Admiral Ross made a calming gesture with his hands, pointless over subspace since she didn't see it, only his face was showing. "Personally I don’t think Bashir was involved, but when Starfleet Intelligence gets an idea in their heads I’ve learned just to amiably go along until I’m needed in some critical way to settle things.”

“Don’t tell me they are that serious about this?” she adjusted her PADDS in front of her, wishing the view screen was on a conference table instead of the smaller desk in Captain Picard’s ready room. She felt stronger behind a conference stable. “Captain Picard was adamant that we are going to give this man his Christopher Pike even if its a bit overblown to have three Captains and two Admirals award it...”

“Christopher Pike…??? You can’t be serious? You know what we usually give those awards for don’t you?”

“Fighting off hundreds of genetically engineered Jem’Hadar soldiers to protect some forty civilians is no small feet, even for a Genetically Engineered man, and shows substantial bravery, which falls within the guidelines of the award. We all fought about which one we wanted him to get, since there were so many that he could have been given...”

“You want to give him the Medal of Valor,” Ross repeated, as if he didn’t believe her. “Even if this man is now a suspect in a kidnapping and murder investigation?”

“Have you any evidence that said kidnapping and murder has actually occurred?” she countered hotly, now starting to lose her temper.

“Not really,” Ross admitted, slumping back into his chair. “Doctor Zimmerman is missing, but we have no proof he’s dead or was kidnapped…or even that Bashir was in any way involved. The only thing we know is that Zimmerman was receiving death threats after the incident on Deep Space Nine.”

_Ah ha! He blinked this time!_

“So Starfleet security is concerned that a man is missing, right after a man with Augment genes was involved in a huge political incident here on Rubicun III, a man who is now a religious figure on _two_ worlds, and will be involved rather closely in the Antican and Selay negotiations, since he’ll be in the room with the Ambassador during them. You tell me if this doesn’t sound like an excuse to get his cooperation with them in some way.”

“I can’t, and you're right,” he sighed. “They do have a way of making small incidents seem larger to get what they want.”

“Not that I wouldn’t blame them, they were just on my back yesterday to find some way to get a high level Starfleet Officer inside that room! The Anticans and Selay will accept the Doctor because the Ambassador needs him and they only want a Bajoran diplomat and she’s the only one Bajor would send. No other officers of any kind will be allowed I’m sure. Parliament has enough problems with their decision to join us, without _those_ two backing out of the conference. They would have been smarter to remain a neutral world.”

“Not if the Dominion continues moving in with the Tholians, then they will need our protection,” Ross critically changed the subject away from Bashir. “We have indications now that this is likely going to happen. Tholians will accept anybody who will keep them buffered from outside invaders.”

“What have you discovered so far?” Nacheyev was grateful for a chance to change the subject. Any subject but the redoubtable Doctor would be preferable.

“Mostly we’ve detected ship movements, along those borders from the wormhole...cargo ships. We’re working on an idea for mining the wormhole as we speak, so don’t even ask. All the test mines we’ve tried have just been set off by the wormhole opening or were destroyed by the Dominion ships coming through, who were warned about them beforehand. We can’t risk destroying the station at the same time with something larger. And Bajor won’t let us bring a fleet in to guard it, it would be inflammatory if we did and potentially drag Bajor into the conflict with the Dominion. It’s a little bit aggravating, really.”

“I can well imagine it,” she sat back, and looked at her PADDS, “I hate to cut this off, but I have a meeting with Picard in ten minutes. Is there anymore that you needed to tell me about Bashir before I let you go…?”

“No, but there is something else, I might as well tell you now so you can make the others aware,” ‘the others’ being Admiral Saduk, and the Captains currently under her command. His face grew rather serious, and he put his hands under his chin in thought. “In fact, if I hadn’t known better, I would have thought that Starfleet Intelligence was on about Bashir because of this, but this incident happened several weeks ago without our knowledge…”

_I knew it! I knew he was keeping something from me!_

“Admiral…”

“You may want to brace yourself,” He started speaking again before she could mention that she was getting impatient. This had to be serious. “Talar Prime is now reporting that there was a break out of a prisoner on their prison colony known as 8723, about three weeks ago, near our shared border. Two hundred Talarian soldiers are dead,” Nacheyev blinked this time, and her mouth dropped. “The prison had only one prisoner; a Starfleet Officer who we agreed to leave in the Talarian’s care despite our treaty with them indicating otherwise. Now they believe we broke the rules of our treaty by crossing into their borders to rescue this man. Talarian ships are now patrolling their border and warning Starfleet ships away, and they’ve been having communications with Cardassia and Tholia. The Talarian Republic may be joining the Dominion.”

“Shit! Why the hell did you not tell me this first? Worst is first always!”

“I wanted to surprise you,” Ross teased. “And you are rather farther away from Talar right now so you don’t have anything to worry about yet, but if they do join the Dominion we’ll have to start shoring up our borders, which means pulling ships back from Parliament.”

“Did we do it?”

“Did we do what?” Ross said, feigning ignorance.

“Help this man escape from prison!” she said, flustered.

“Not that I know of, in fact,” he took on a guilty look. “Most people had forgotten he was there. Only Starfleet Intelligence was being kept abreast of his status by Talar…”

“So then, what has this to do with Bashir?”

“Nothing really, but surprise surprise, this man is also genetically engineered,” Ross shrugged. “You just have to use the words ‘genetic’ and ‘engineer’ in a sentence and Starfleet Intelligence will be all over it. I can only imagine this incident, and Zimmerman’s recent disappearance, are both very related in their minds, just because of those two words.”

Nacheyev took a deep breath. Now she wasn’t sure they weren’t, and she hated the short moment she had to take to second guess herself, falling back to prejudice.

“Starfleet Intelligence needs to learn a critical lesson; correlation does not always equal causation.”

“You don’t need to tell me twice. But they have far more information than I do. Now if I were the Head of Starfleet Intelligence I could be a bit more help…”

“I bet, better stick with Starfleet Security…When are they giving you that job anyway?”

“Hopefully before the Dominion invades?” He chuckled. “We aren’t rushing to pick a replacement at this time, Donovan only died a few months ago, and many Admirals are still of the opinion that Sisko should be the one for that job. But we’re not pushing him into it if he doesn’t want it. It's one of those jobs that often just lays open waiting for the right Captain to get his land legs back.”

“Well hopefully before Starfleet Intelligence throws all their spies at us in paranoia,” Nacheyev had fallen prey to such thoughts when she was still assigned to Starfleet Headquarters. Paranoia was easy when you were surrounded by embassy gossips and Starfleet security officers all day. “They seem to know everything, but only in the context they want you to hear it. Make them show you all their cards first before you decide to arrest anybody, you have that authority you know.”

Ross smiled broadly, and gave her a small nod before breaking the connection.

 _Sometimes I think that man is trying to annoy me on purpose!_ she shook that thought away and was annoyed when the PADD she had shuffled fell on the floor near the desk. _Get it together Alynna, you have work to do. One thing’s for sure, this quarantining lifting ceremony is not going to be what anybody expected!_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't hurt me, but I think there's going to be one more chapter after this, then a small interlude part, and then the next part in the series will begin. The Interlude will be less action, pure romance, so you can look forward to that.
> 
> I was rather hoping that just the implication that the quarantine was ending would do all the talking for the virus plot in this chapter, rather than having another long chapter of studying the Vorta blood sample and developing a cure for the Edo with no action or further conflict established. I also like the little tete-a-tete between the two opposing Admirals. :3


	10. Soul Music

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last chapter! I hope this wraps up, much of it, but again, there will be an interlude coming up, so keep an eye out on my page for that, and then there's going to be part two. I can't wait to get started!

_“For courage and selflessness beyond the call of duty, in the finest traditions of Starfleet and the United Federation of Planets, I hereby award you the Christopher Pike Medal of Valor…”_

He was still reeling. His chest was still aching. Edo were dancing and celebrating in the clearings all around him with the other Starfleet officers and he could barely hear or see them over his own struggle to contain the emotions that were overwhelming him.

He declined to dance with the Edo. He declined to sit and talk to Captain Picard. He stumbled away from the party and the pageantry, away from the release of a thousand Casswa chicks into the wild, in order to start rebuilding their population here in the Capitol, something he had been looking forward to watching. He was still trying to fathom these unfathomable feelings that were starting to settle deep in his belly. He had never felt like this before.

Jealousy. Resentment. _Anger_ for what had happened that had lead to these feelings. Then hurtful resentment again. And overwhelming _guilt._

It burned. It was like nothing he had ever felt before. As he stumbled through the empty city paths away from the clearing he quickly realized he wasn’t alone. He turned, expecting to tell whoever it was to leave him, and then shut his mouth immediately when he saw who it was.

“You promised me you would dance with me, if there was dancing,” Savil said, approaching him cautiously.

“I...I’m sorry... _t’hy’la_ ,” Data found that he had to work hard to speak, and realized just then and there he had once again used a contraction without any effort, and not as quotation of another crewmember. “I am not feeling myself at this moment.”

“We do not have to dance. We can go for a walk. It’s warmer here in the Capitol.”

Data reluctantly offered her his arm, knowing he would have to be honest, and not wanting to be honest in any way shape or form. He was not feeling proud of himself right now. But the new bond they were sharing between them meant that she was going to be sensing his moods, if only the very surface feelings, since Vulcans were so constantly aware and defensive against such thoughts in their own minds.

“I was feeling many things just now, during the ceremony,” he started, once they had walked as far from the festivities as he felt safe to go before speaking. “I was...jealous of Doctor Bashir, resentful that he was awarded for his actions here that saved lives, and I was…was...”

“Punished. By the same Admiral that rewarded him...” Savil supplied.

“Yes! And...and _angry,_ ” he tensed, and she pulled away a little as he stopped. “Angry that...that despite breaking the Prime Directive, and violating medical law, nothing bad happened to him! Nothing! And now I feel...guilt. That I was...wishing bad things upon a friend. But I don’t understand the lack of consequences, not even the discussion of it...nothing...”

He turned his head down to look at the path, still not quite aware as to where he had gone, feeling lost. His normal android functions, calculating exact distances and routes taken, time passed and date and location, were being compromised during this time of extreme emotion, and he was not happy with that fact. 

“Admiral Nacheyev did explain why he wasn’t reprimanded,” Savil said, taking his arm again. It was an un-Vulcan gesture that she had been doing since her pon farr and he wondered if it was a sign of her promise to aid him in experiencing all the uses of his human emotional range, or whether she was still under the effects of pon farr in some way. Or perhaps she simply preferred closer than usual physical contact, they were rather alone. In public Vulcans only touched fingers.

“I understand why the circumstances here are fundamentally different than a standard Starfleet Away mission. The long mission, the emotional trauma of the situation, of going through what he had. The Edo gave Doctor Bashir no choice but to go along with their religion, and Captain Picard argued that _not_ countering the Edo’s new belief system respected their rights under the Prime Directive. Without a clear argument in either direction, there couldn’t be any action taken. But...but…” He struggled to find the words. “It still feels as if he…’got away with murder’...is the closest human phrase I could find to fit this emotion. When it is in fact the exact opposite. I...think I need to have a self-diagnostic…”

“No,” Savil turned him to look at her and he felt guilt and no little part of humiliation seeping up in his chest. “I think you feel what many humans feel when under extreme circumstances with no easy answers and arguments to be made in equal measure on either side. And I believe what you need to do is be honest and tell him how you feel. Doctor Bashir is your friend.”

Data felt his shoulders shaking, his teeth gritted and his eyes watered over. Grief. Sorrow. And more Guilt. He understood these emotions, at least. He let himself lose control and pulled her into his arms to cry on her shoulder. She was so tolerant of his mercurial emotions. Was there ever any doubt about his feelings for her, his appreciation of her continual absolving presence?

_I still plan to run a diagnostic. The emotions may be justified but the contractions...are severely unexpected. But...she is right. I had better tell Doctor Bashir how I feel. He has been one of my most supportive friends in regards to my relationship with Savil, despite not knowing her before we landed. I owe him for that. Other friends have been more skeptical as to how fast this relationship has gone._

He couldn’t understand why. Here was his love, his future wife…a Vulcan, who was in no small part telling him it was okay to feel the emotions he felt, just accepting that this was a part of who he was. She was _perfect_ for him.

How could they not feel the same?

\------

 _God, no wonder they didn’t tell me what award they were planning to give me, I feel like my Shuttlecraft_ just _crashed again!_

Edo men and women were dancing around him, pulling him along the clearing and down the pathways, all designated punishment zones had been cancelled for the day and people were trampling every inch of earth they could trample. Rivan had embraced him and promptly kissed him, and so had her second, Liator, and he had been hostile to every Starfleet officer from day one. And suddenly he was in a chain of Edo pulling him through the streets to throw flowers on his head and kiss his cheek, all trying to be the next one to touch him in some way. It was pure adoration. It was very quickly going to his head.

Julian wasn’t sure whether to politely pull away or pull Rivan into his arms and make passionate love to her...until the choice was made for him when Commander Data suddenly came running down the street with Savil, in the traditional Edo manner of running everywhere, and pulled him away for a conversation. Savil remained at a distance from them in order to keep most of the the Edo at bay so they could have privacy.

Both men crashed on the bench, Savil finally shooing away one last adoring Edo so they could finally talk.

“I can’t seem to stop them, they seem to all want to touch me and see for themselves I’m real…”

“Physical contact is one way in which humanoids can feel a deeper connection to something…I have been told.”

Julian grinned at Data, who was picking at his uniform uncharacteristically, and looking anywhere but at his companion. Feeling that there was something serious in his need to speak to him privately, Julian quietly waited for Data to continue.

“Doctor...I had something I wanted to tell you. Because you are my friend, and I wish to be honest…about my feelings...”

Julian felt two and two coming together immediately as Data released every frustration, revealing his feelings completely, the stress he had been under, his punishment on the _Enterprise_ before landing, and then... _then_ he then proceeded to apologize!

“No, Data, you have every right to feel these emotions, no matter how contrary they may seem. I’d be angry and jealous too,” Julian pulled the little velvet case with his new medal out of his pocket. “To be perfectly honest, I’ve been thinking of returning it...I don’t know if I can accept this, knowing that there were so many brave Starfleet officers on this planet working hard to save the Edo. I don’t feel right to have been singled out for an award.”

“No Doctor, I think the award was well deserved, for what happened before our arrival…” Data looked out across the street, where Savil was still waiting at a sensible distance. “I have no objections to your courage being acknowledged, and neither should you.”

“I suppose,” Julian felt the embarrassment and guilt suddenly rising as he pocketed the award again. “I did my best I suppose. It hurts though, the Edo I was awarded for saving from the Jem’Hadar are all dead because of the virus. I wish they could have survived at least, it would have felt like my actions meant something…”

“Your actions did mean something, Doctor,” Data said, and turned to look at Julian, finally, his gaze reminding Julian of Picard’s wise look when he had given him advice the week before. “If you had simply hidden in the shelter with the Edo hoping to remain undetected, the Jem’Hadar would have moved onto the next village, attacked a different group, maybe even those who had not been infected. Or they might have found you down there anyways, in a vulnerable place. And while the Edo you saved are no longer with us, Ambassador Els Renora is still here, and likely quite grateful for your actions. You should ask her if she feels your actions are wasted.”

“You don’t think she’ll be biased because of my status with Bajor?” he almost immediately regretted the comment. He hated being reminded of his religious status with now two different races, he was sure other people would see this as arrogance on his part.

“I think she’ll be more honest because of it,” Data reasoned. “She has no reason to lie to someone she has chosen as her escort based on faith. Bajoran faith, as I recall, emphasizes humility and honesty when consulting with religious figures.”

“I suppose your right. She has been taking a back seat in all this too. I’m sure she’ll be relieved to finally have me back as her private doctor”

“And relieved to get to Parliament and get this treaty signing business over with.”

Julian chuckled, thinking about how long it would probably take to even get a treaty signed between Selay and Antica, and smiled as Lieutenant Savil approached them.

“I want to thank you both,” Julian said at last when she joined them, to Data’s sudden surprise. “I had no idea where that dance was going to lead, but not back to my shared quarters with the Ambassador on the _Enterprise_ , and certainly not to my own bed. Maybe somebody else's. And just between you and me?” he leaned forward a little, feigning discretion. “Edo don’t use fertilization prevention medications of any kind. And I don’t recall the last time any of us had those hypos on hand to give to the away teams. I don’t fancy my chances of not becoming a father on this world!”

Data laughed along with him, and stood up to walk with Savil back towards the clearing. Bashir decided to go with them, hopefully heading back towards the less erotically inclined Admirals and not back to the overly erotic Edo.

At least not until he had a handy hypospray ready.

\-----

Captain Jean-Luc Picard gave the most delightful sigh of relief and contentment as he finally settled down into the seat of his own chair, on his own bridge, on his own ship, for the first time in weeks. Commander Riker gave a knowing chuckle, and looked across him at Counselor Troi to share that smile.

“So Number One, how is my ship? Still holding together?”

“Haven’t lost any bolts, but we have too many knuts in my opinion,” he grinned, and Picard shared with him a rare chuckle.

“We’ll, I’m about ready to throw in my lot with those knuts, they had the sense to stay on this ship instead of beaming down to Bedlam. What is our estimate time to leave orbit?”

“Five minutes, sir,” said Lieutenant Chalmers, from his station at OPS. “The last of the away party members are beaming on board now.”

“Very good,” said Picard, checking the miniscreen of his armrest for confirmation from the transporter room. “Helm, set course for Parliament, Warp 4, as soon as we are able to leave.”

“Yes sir!” said Ensign Raegan, looking bubbly and bright back at her helm station. Picard wondered if this meant she would be staying on the ship.

“So, our next, and last, order of business is transporting the Ambassador and both the Admirals to Parliament. Then I’ve been informed we all have earned a bit of shore leave on the planet...so long as we both dress up and join in the formal party that Parliament is going to be throwing when we arrive.”

“A party?” Riker looked stricken, not a fan of fancy dress affairs and Counsellor Troi leaned forward.

“What are we going to be celebrating, sir?”

“Parliament was formally granted membership into the Federation this morning,” Picard stretched his legs out a little. “Admiral Ross informed me and Admiral Nacheyev that even more diplomats have decided to relocate to Parliament from the remote Starbases where their embassies had been located before, so more ships will be arriving, its going to be a big to do. Bajor will certainly have a permanent Embassy there now as well as on Earth, and the Vulcans want a representation too, as they made first contact with Parliament so many ages ago, Embassies from the the local worlds who are not in the Federation are interested too. Our new Sheliak representative has suggested he would be more comfortable at Parliament than on Earth, as well as the Talarian Ambassadors, who have threatened to shut down their Embassy on Earth...”

“At least they acknowledge Parliament as a trustworthy world for negotiations, even if it is a Federation world now,” Troi said. “Unless they were unaware of Parliament’s application for membership?”

“They were aware, it was public record,” Picard scratched his chin absently. “But they aren’t going to simply throw out a peace treaty with the Federation over this confusing incident. No, I have word that the _Destiny_ will be on its way to Talarian space after the peace talks are finished, to help with the investigation.”

“Thank God. What exactly were they upset about anyways?”

“It's rather classified, ask me later in private,” Picard said, casting a brief look towards the overtly interested helm officer. He breathed another sigh of relief as she gave hasty notice that they were ready to leave and sent them into Warp 4 immediately. 

The tiny blue and green ball that was Rubicun III slipped off into the distant stars, filling him with the greatest feeling of satisfaction. The worst was over for now, and Parliament would be mostly a snooze if all he had told Riker was true, so he was looking forward to peace, some reading, and less so, to celebrating with Parliament’s dignitaries.

_Thankfully we’ll be celebrating in a more dignified manner than last night’s party with the Edo!_

Although...it had been nice, really nice, to take Beverly Crusher by the hand and lead her to the clearing to dance with the others…a little bit of Bedlam didn’t hurt now and then.

\--------

Admiral Nacheyev settled into her comfy chair, in her quarters, with a sigh, relief filling her mind for the first time in a very long time. She’d gotten through her last meeting with Captain Picard without feeling like she wanted to shake some sense into the man, both of them enjoying a laugh, the last bit of thawing of the ice from their previous falling out over Commander Data. The long term ice would be a long term project, but she was up to the task she was certain. Things had not been irreparably destroyed between them.

She was surprised that she had been invited to the Commander’s wedding on Parliament. She has also assumed that the pair would wait until they could reach Vulcan to marry, but then again, she knew Savil’s family, what they were like. Savil’s father had been a science officer when he was younger, and had the rank of Commander for a short time, in charge of his own science vessel, before deciding that Starfleet wasn’t traditional enough for his tastes and returning to Vulcan to teach sciences and adopt twin children; Savil and S'Vek. His wife had been barren, but as a High Priestess was responsible for many children in the adoption system on Vulcan and had taken these two children after decades of not adopting any. Her husband’s decision to return to Vulcan had been her reasoning for doing so.

_Hah! As if! If only Sisko knew who S'Vek’s birth parents were! He’d stop complaining about him on the spot!_

The Vulcan intelligence officer was now posted to Deep Space 9 for the duration, something she knew would ruffle a lot of feathers, especially Constable Odo. Starfleet Intelligence rarely posted a long term officer on the station in deference to Bajor’s decision that Odo would remain as their appointed Constable and intelligence expert of station affairs.

But S'Vek wasn’t going to be there to spy on Bajor or the Dominion, or even Starfleet officers and Federation citizens. He had only one person he had been gathering intelligence on since being posted...someone who wasn’t even on the station!

_And is in for a nasty surprise when he gets back!_

Nacheyev winced and got out of her chair to replicate herself some synthehol in a shot glass. Then she changed her order to some mulled cider in a hefty mug. Her usual glass bottle of amber whiskey was empty and it would be awhile until she could buy the real thing, she hated replicated whiskey with a passion.

_He might not get any chance to learn anything. As soon as we reach Parliament Starfleet Intelligence will be all over Bashir with questions about what he’s been doing and who he’s been contacting all last month. The Edo is the obvious answer. And who the hell decided that the Destiny would be the one to ferry our intelligence people around anyways? She doesn’t even have a Captain yet!_

But Nacheyev knew Admiral Ross had plans for the _Destiny_. It was the sister ship of _Enterprise_ , the current ship Ross had been using to ferry himself and transferred personnel to and from DS9 with, and a ship of the same design as _Enterprise_ with the same firepower would make her a formidable battleship to have in an emergency. She deserved an equally legendary Captain. Hopefully Ross would finally get Riker out of that second seat and commanding his own ship. _Destiny_ would likely not be at Parliament by the time the _Enterprise_ reached the planet, but Ross and his people would still be there waiting for Bashir. She planned to wrestle that man into a private meeting to discuss the future First Officer of _Enterprise_.

She was certain her decision would meet with Ross and Picard’s most enthusiastic approval. She sank back into her chair with her cider in contemplation.

_Now to start making arrangements for Ambassador Els on Parliament, and my part of this mission is done. I can just relax, and get ready to waltz._

\------------

_Somewhere out there. Out in the darkness...beneath the pale moonlight...a fugitive running, thinking of me, fallen from grace...and loving me tonight..._

He combined the two songs into one lyric, and congratulated himself on his human-like creativity. Once again he had shown individuality. Once again he had shown that he was more than the sum of his original programming, his newfound interest in Broadway musicals proof of such.

_I’ll show him that I’m useful for more than scrubbing conduits!_

The manoeuvring thrusters on his runabout were very quickly coasting sideways, and he ran a diagnostic, attempting to determine just exactly what was causing the inconsiderate piece of equipment to begin malfunctioning.

 _I’m a Doctor, not a Pilot,_ he thought snidely. _I should be diagnosing diseases not dancing through nebula...oh, I like that._

He mentally made a note of this idea, then set about making repairs as he mentally composed more of his song.

_Somewhere out there, God be my witness, someone’s saying a prayer. I never shall yield. Until we come face to face, In that big somewhere out there..._

_Blip…Blip…Blip…REEEOOH! REEOOOH_

The sudden sound of the proximity sensor coming to life caused him to gasp and pull free of the crawlspace under the shuttle floor, forgetting for a moment that he could phase through surfaces and ducking his head.

“Right...yes. Of course,” he had clipped the edge of the opening and glared at his half phased hand, pointedly practising the fine holographic art of not showing off the fact that he was, indeed, a hologram, by pulling his arm free and manoeuvring around the hole in the floor so he would not ‘fall in it’. “Computer, report the status of sensors!”

_“Sensors are operating within normal parameters.”_

“That isn’t what I meant. I mean, why did the sensors set off an alarm?”

_“The proximity alarm was activated in response to the Andorian battle cruiser, Timmest.”_

“The _Timmest_?” Emergency Medical Hologram Number 1802 stood to his feet and went back to the controls. “On screen computer.”

 _Timmest_ was large and...frightening. She was also Andorian. A Federation world, therefore a federation ship. EMH 1802 rounded out another chorus in order to calm himself down.

_Stars...in your multitudes…even though I know...how very far apart we are...scarce to be counted...No that’s not right...um...Even though I know you are scarce to be counted… Yes! That’s it!_

“Computer, hail the _Timmest,”_ a blip of the computer and the channel was open. “ _Timmest_ , this is the Runabout _Saugeen_ , come in _Timmest_.”

“This is the _Timmest_. You are not authorized to be travelling in this sector _Saugeen_. Prepare to be boarded.”

“Boarded??”

A sudden sparkle of transporter beams and he realized that his shields had been lowered without his authorization. Because, of course, he was a hologram.

“ _Timmest_ this is Black Thirteen,” a human male, with red hair and a lot of anger in his eyes was now looking down at the EMH in the cockpit, anger turning to disgust as he scanned the hologram with a tricorder. “It’s another decoy, beam me back on board.”

“There you are!” said EMH as the man sparkled out of existence again. “Nothing to be worried about!”

It was a momentary flash really. A dawning of realization. Like his conjoining of _Les Miserables_ with _An American Tale._ He should have put two and two together. There was a _reason_ he had been sent out on this mission after all!

“Shields up computer! Shields! Raise shields!”

 _“You do not have authorization to give this order, EMH 1802,”_ the computer responded. 

_And so it must be...somewhere out there…_

The _Saugeen_ , the EMH 1802 program, and all evidence of this encounter was obliterated from existence with one sweeping blast of _Timmest_ ’s phasers.

The antiquated predator ship _Timmest_ finished its sweep of the area, wiping out any trace of the destroyed craft, before it returned to its slow silent patrol of the Federation Border.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I chose the name Saugeen for one of the Rivers I grew up near as a child, and because Runabouts are named after Earth's Rivers on DS9. I also chose Victor Hugo's birth year, 1802, to name the EMH. I hope you like that little tidbit. :)


End file.
